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 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
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 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 HW YORK BOSTON CHICAGO DALLAS 
 ATLANTA SAN FRANCISCO 
 
 MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED 
 
 LONDON BOMBAY CALCUTTA 
 MELBOURNE 
 
 THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Lrn. 
 
 TORONTO
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 A COMEDY OF GROWTH 
 
 BY 
 
 CLEMENCE 
 
 Author of "Regiment of Women" 
 
 First the blade, then the ear, after that 
 the full corn in the ear. 
 
 St. Mark 4.28 
 
 fork 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 1918 
 
 All rights reserved
 
 COPYBIGHT. 1918 
 
 BT CLEMENCE DANE 
 
 Set up and electrotyped. Published, March, 1918
 
 Each man to himself and each woman to herself, is the word of the 
 
 past and present, and the true word of immortality; 
 No one can acquire for another not one, 
 Not one can grow for another not one. 
 
 The song is to the singer, and comes back most to him, 
 
 The teaching is to the teacher, and comes back most to him, 
 
 The love is to the lover, and comes back most to him, 
 
 The gift is to the giver, and comes back most to him it cannot fail, 
 
 And no man understands any greatness or goodness but his own, or 
 the indication of his own. 
 
 WALT WHITMAN. 
 
 2129126
 
 FIRST THE BLADE
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 'ONCE upon a time' and we pull in our deep chairs, you 
 quietly, I with a quick impatient jerk that scrabbles up the 
 hearth-rug and worries your tidy soul. But you yourself 
 have forgotten the blinds ! Draw them close, lest the Zep- 
 pelins catch us at our story-telling, whilst I put the carpet 
 to rights again and pile up logs (we sawed them ourselves, 
 didn't we?) upon the fire. One must save the electricity 
 these hard times. And now you have your knitting and 
 I the fountain-pen you gave me: it has not run out, for a 
 wonder! pen and fat, blank scribbling book. Are you 
 ready? The postman has gone by for the last time to- 
 night no letters but the news was not so bad to-day 
 the Russians have taken prisoners our front is quiet 
 we dare forget the war for an hour. 
 
 Think we are beginning a book! Do you remember 
 our breathless hour three years ago? "We were over- 
 whelmed by our own daring such grubs as we, to dream 
 of spreading wings, real, published, book-cover wings, 
 black or red (you were soberly for black, of course, and I 
 for red) with gilt lettering across them. In anticipation 
 we enjoyed ourselves so hugely that the book itself had 
 much ado to get written at all. But the war has ended 
 that keen pleasure of ours, as it has ended better things. 
 We begin soberly now-a-days 'Once upon a time ' 
 
 Once upon a time, before the war 
 
 You know, Adam and Eve must have reckoned that way! 
 Can 't you hear them telling stories to Cain and little Abel ? 
 
 3
 
 4 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 'Ever so long ago, when the tree of knowledge was still 
 pink ' 
 
 'Once upon a time, before the apples were ripe ' 
 
 Even so, Collaborator (clumsy title, but even in the 7m- 
 perial Dictionary it has no synonym) even so once upon 
 a time, before the war, there lived a hero and a heroine 
 and their relations. 
 
 And, you know, we got as far as that four months ago. 
 
 It's not so easy, writing a book! 
 
 Let us run over our facts. 
 
 The hero is called Justin, and the girl, Laura Laura 
 Valentine. I know you dislike it, but it is my turn to 
 choose, and honestly, if you think it over, you will find that 
 'Laura' is the only name for her. She is real enough al- 
 ready to make me sure of that. Laura grave, graceful, 
 ageless word, fits like a glove my Laura, our Laura, so un- 
 modern in her ways and thoughts, for all she was born in 
 '94. Yet the name stands, to you, for ringlets and bottle- 
 neck shoulders, for simpers and sighs and Harry and Lucy? 
 But those were its evil days, when it was befrilled and 
 crinolined by the same spirit that figleafs Apollo and 
 measures the Milo Venus for a pair of stays. The name 
 has older memories, older even than its Italian gardens 
 and passionate poets, memories old as sunshine and song 
 and the laurel-tree itself. Indeed, that enchanted bush, 
 that grave tree with blood-red berries, that panting girl 
 within stiff bark and quiet leaves, reminds me not a 
 little of Laura, our own bewildered Laura, when Love, 
 the crazy torch-bearer, came rioting down the Bracken- 
 hurst lanes, to break through the garden fences of her 
 ignorance, and, entering, set the quiet house of her mind 
 afire. 
 
 And so, unless you insist, we will keep the name : it has 
 taught us already something about her. 
 
 What is she like to look at? 
 
 She is shadowy as yet, but I think you said, and I agreed, 
 that she has soft, shining eyes shining, not sparkling and
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 5 
 
 is wonderfully light on her feet. I think, what with the 
 sway of her pretty figure, and her quick white hands that 
 are the only restless things about her, she has, though she 
 is not a little woman, a fugitive, thistledown air, that makes 
 you want to dance with her. Yet she cannot dance : never 
 troubled to learn. Dancing bored Justin. Her dancing 
 days were over before she learned that it is not always wise 
 to humour Justin. 
 
 Thus far Laura Valentine. The name grows on you, 
 doesn't it? That is why you are such a perfect Col- 
 laborator. I can always persuade you into agreeing with 
 me. 
 
 But 'Justin' less easy to conceive, eh? Yet, knowing 
 Laura as little even as we do, he should be obvious prose 
 to her verse : she, the glove for his hand : the red and white 
 halves of an apple. Laura implies Justin as day implies 
 night, winter summer, sunshine rain. We should be 
 justified in leaving them, at the end, wooed and wedded 
 and a ', in a very rainbow of happiness. And yet I doubt. 
 
 They fit too well, complement each other too perfectly. 
 I foresee complications. Suppose only suppose that, 
 nicely adjusted as their ages are with seven years between 
 them in the love season, there should yet be a hitch ? She, 
 as girls do, may have grown in a day, an hour, in the swift- 
 ness of a handshake, into a woman : have entered into that 
 heritage of knowledge, and instinct that is more than 
 knowledge, that Lilith willed her, and Helen perfected, and 
 Rachel and Monica, Grizel and Mother Goose, have all 
 passed on: while he? Suppose that he does not grow up 
 at all? I only say, suppose! I have not as yet an idea 
 of how the story develops. "We are still groping for our 
 hero don't even know if he were short or tall. 
 
 What have you fancied, of all possible types ? You must 
 distinguish, you know, between the Justin of Laura's fan- 
 tasy, Jupiter Tonans when he is not Tom-Fool, and the 
 Justin of sheer fact, who, worthy man, has not the imagina- 
 tion to be either. You must not protest. He is, as Laura
 
 6 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 and his mother are fond of agreeing, a dear, an utter dear, 
 if you like (I never know which face is the prettier to 
 watch as they say it) but imaginative, never ! Not, at least, 
 as far as the story has run. We are discussing the middle 
 of the book by now, have hurried on so, shall have to go 
 back to our beginnings soon. Let us hope people will not 
 find it confusing. Not, I repeat, dear solemn man, with 
 one lonely spark of imagination and little enough humour. 
 Collaborator, he positively must not have a sense of humour 
 or he would never collect birds' eggs. And it is essential, 
 as you will see later, that he should collect birds' eggs 
 with passion. We were saying that he possibly does not 
 grow-up at all. 'Grow' would perhaps be the better word, 
 for, in a sense he has been, at every age, definitely grown- 
 up; has indeed, except for the birds' eggs, never been 
 youthful. There are some early photographs . . . (No, 
 there are none of Laura she was a high-tempered child. 
 She sat still once for love of a non-existent canary, but 
 you did not deceive her twice.) But Justin 'took' beauti- 
 fully. In all the innumerable pictures his bright squirrel 
 of a mother never tired of showing Laura, he is exactly 
 the same. Justin with rattle: Justin enjoying his toe: 
 Justin with spade and pail and a seascape: Justin with 
 blazer and bat: Justin and a smudge of moustache: Jus- 
 tin aggressively clean-shaven : Justin at any age from three 
 to thirty; but never the incipient Justin, the developing 
 Justin, never grub and chrysalis and moth, but Justin 
 Homunculus, Justin in enlargement, never Justin in 
 growth. 
 
 Pleasant, yellowed pictures, for all that, of a squarish 
 face with an obstinate mouth and intent, solemn eyes. 
 Solemnity is perhaps the first quality that would be im- 
 pressed upon you if you should interview Justin. Here, 
 you would perceive, was one who took life, revolving as 
 it did upon the axis of Henry Justin Cloud, with becoming 
 gravity. He was not pompous, but his slow-moving mind 
 would be alarming because its very intentness upon such
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 7 
 
 facts as it grasped rendered it unobservant, to the point 
 of inhumanity, of anything to which its attention had not 
 been attracted. And you would not find its attention 
 easy to attract. Upon your honour, unless you were 
 careful, you might find yourself at times, his creator 
 though you were, a trifle in awe of Justin. Laura cer- 
 tainly was. This, you know, is curious, for, as a rule, 
 nothing but a keen sense of humour can wake in a man's 
 eye that comprehending twinkle that alone intimidates a 
 woman of poise. And Justin, we know, had no sense of 
 humour at all. 
 
 What? You protest once more that without a sense of 
 humour he cannot be a hero ? I am shocked. Who are we, 
 to fall foul of Henry V, and Mr. Rochester, and Garth 
 Dalmainf Nevertheless, if you insist 
 
 To tell you the truth, I am rather glad that you do 
 insist. Unless our hero and our heroine have a sense of 
 humour there is no chance at all of a happy ending: and 
 in these days a happy ending, for a conscientious scribbler 
 holding the mirror to nature, would be so manifestly un- 
 true to life, would be so consequently inartistic, would be, 
 in short, such a blessed relief, that one is tempted to leave 
 a small chance, a stray peg on which to hang a wedding 
 garment, should sir and lady, at the last, combine to send 
 out invitations and include their chroniclers. 
 
 So Justin is to have an embryonic sense of humour ; that 
 is to say, he shall have, at least, eyes in his head, and will 
 one day, you are sure and I hope, learn to see with them ; 
 but at the crisis of his life I fear he will be still purblind, 
 wearing the pedantry his own spiritual myopia has in- 
 duced, like smoke-coloured spectacles upon his Eoman 
 nose. 
 
 Thus far, in his turn, Henry Justin Cloud. He has 
 stirred at last, and the girl with him, in the shadows of 
 this half-planned tale in which we, too, wander uncer- 
 tainly, ignorant of their story, guessing at their fate, know- 
 ing only, with a touch of awe, that out of nothingness they
 
 8 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 have been born and must continue, linked and struggling, 
 to an appointed, undiscovered end. 
 
 And here, suddenly, in the vague muddle of my mind 
 or yours, but as certainly as if he were sitting beside us, 
 Justin lights his pipe. And the spark, flaring up like a 
 thought, shows Laura at his elbow, shows how soft and 
 pale and eager her face is as she looks at him and that 
 she has beech-red hair. And the light fades again more 
 quickly even than it came, and leaves us still sitting over 
 the fire, but with two new, solid facts to guide us: Laura, 
 we have seen it with our eyes, loves Justin, and Justin 
 loves, at least, his pipe. Which, for one evening's work, 
 Collaborator, is not so bad! 
 
 Time for bed, I think. But to-morrow, if the news is 
 good, and war-work done, and it is too rainy to garden, 
 we will pull up our chairs again, and perhaps, with luck, 
 get on with Chapter Two.
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 As usual, you are perfectly right. The first thing, I agree, 
 is to decide where to begin; that is, to discover at what 
 period Laura and Justin, who, after all, interest them- 
 selves from the days when they were as old as their tongues, 
 and months ahead of their teeth, begin to be interesting 
 to other people. That is a simple matter? I believe you 
 think, oh trustful Collaborator, that you have but to drop 
 a suggestion, like a penny in a chocolate machine, for a 
 chapter to roll out, ready written, for your censorship! 
 Consider the initial difficulties! "Who, for instance, is to 
 decide this question of the interesting moment? John 
 Smith, who likes a good wholesome love story with Sweet 
 Seventeen for heroine ? Or Sweet Seventeen herself, whose 
 Prince Charming must be fifty if a day, grey-headed, iron- 
 mouthed, and hopelessly entangled with a repentant actress 
 of at least three distinct, disreputable pasts? Would they 
 be interested in the countrified Laura, not yet a schoolgirl, 
 whom I should dearly love to draw ? Of course not ! 
 
 No, the protagonists must be at least in their quarter 
 century. But what would Mrs. Cloud, on the other hand, 
 say to that? Slur over, if not ignore, the first ten, let 
 alone the first thirty, years of her son's life, we are, of 
 course, at liberty to do. It is our affair! But, in that 
 case, the book, frankly, will not be worth reading. A 
 character such as Justin's is not so easily deciphered. 
 Thoroughly to appreciate Justin we must begin at the be- 
 ginning. "We are probably not aware that he weighed, 
 at the very beginning, ten pounds. And speaking of teeth 
 half a page ago do we know that there is a little white 
 tooth, in a little white thimble-box, in Mrs. Cloud's big 
 work-basket, that still bears witness how unflinchingly, 
 
 9
 
 10 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 at five and a quarter, Henry Justin could bear pain? 
 Mrs. Cloud showed it to Laura one expansive day, and 
 Laura, fingering it as she listened to the anecdote that 
 led so inevitably to another anecdote, and another, and yet 
 another, was whimsically jealous that his mother should 
 have had so much more of him than she. Had, as she 
 put it away again in the big basket under the pile of socks, 
 a cold eye for the exquisite darns: wondered that Justin 
 had not got blisters on his heel before now. And without 
 an attempt at consistency, sat herself meekly down at Mrs. 
 Cloud's feet to beg a darning lesson; which Mrs. Cloud, 
 with the discerning twinkle her son has not as yet ac- 
 quired, was very ready to give. They were excellent 
 friends, those two. They had affection, and that confident 
 respect for each other which comes of thinking exactly alike 
 on an extremely important subject. They would have 
 both agreed, Collaborator, that to make our book a success, 
 we unquestionably must begin at the beginning the be- 
 ginning, of course, of Henry Justin Cloud. 
 
 But I would rather talk about Laura. 
 
 I know the precedence is Justin's: for Adam was first 
 formed, then Eve. . . . Yet Eve, bless her ingenuous, 
 enterprising heart, is always so much more interesting 
 than Adam. If Adam were not in the Bible, wouldn't you 
 call him 'stodgy'? And don't you think Eve did, under 
 her breath? 
 
 'Adam what's that, in that tree? 
 
 'Look, Adam! 
 
 ' No, not there ! Can 't you see where I 'm pointing ? 
 
 'Rather like a pear, only round. 
 
 'Adam, if you put your foot so and swing yourself up. 
 
 ' Of course the branch will bear you ! 
 
 ' Oh, Adam, you might ! 
 
 'I don't want to eat it. I only want to know what it is. 
 
 'I do think you might! 
 
 'Don't then!' 
 
 And there the serpent's bright, unwinking eye catches
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 11 
 
 hers, and the serpent, all unperceived of Adam, whispers 
 in her ear the one adjective adequate to the situation. 
 
 And as, from that day to this, young birds have twit- 
 tered as old birds sing, I shouldn 't be surprised if Laura, in 
 her turn, has had moments red, secret, shameful, icono- 
 clastic moments when she, too, has rolled the word relish- 
 ingly over her tongue 
 
 "Stodgy! Stodgy! Stodgy!" 
 
 But she was always very sorry afterwards. And so, I 
 daresay, was Eve. 
 
 Adam was never sorry. He was always perfectly happy 
 and self-satisfied. That is why I prefer to begin, at any 
 rate, with Eve Laura, I mean. For a happy man or 
 woman is necessarily dull, dull as a healthy oyster, and as 
 safe. Few enough will care to pry open the hard shell and 
 prod the smug, snug mollusc inside. But when, as will 
 sometimes happen, a grain or two of sharp-edged sand sifts 
 in, to scrape and fret and fester the soft flesh, why, then 
 the pearls begin to come, and the oyster is worth a dive at 
 last. 
 
 Justin, kindly born and bred, is, as far as we know, to 
 be happy all his life, though he had those ill-used months 
 somewhere in his twenties for which Mrs. Cloud, at least, 
 never quite forgave Laura. But Laura's happiness cracked 
 like a cup when she was six, and though she drank from 
 it later, often enough, and pure nectar at that, it was al- 
 ways uncertainly, with a frightened eye upon the rivets 
 with which Time, who mends most things, had put it to- 
 gether again. 
 
 I told you, I think, that the two were orphaned : he had 
 lost one and she both parents: and if it were a schoolboy's 
 misfortune to have forgotten his father (Mrs. Cloud had no 
 opinion of Solomon : if his precepts could produce nothing 
 better than Rehoboam, she had every intention of sparing 
 the rod!) it was very much more definitely a small girl's 
 tragedy that she could remember her mother. 
 
 From six o'clock in the morning, undisturbed by the
 
 12 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 erection of a tent in her bed, to six o'clock in the evening, 
 comprehending that the gutterings from the night-light, 
 surreptitiously kneaded in small hot hands, are more sooth- 
 ing and inductive to sleep than hymns, chocolates, or even 
 The Three Little Men in the Wood, Laura's mother was 
 the most wonderful and satisfactory person in the whole 
 world. 
 
 She had tweedy, uncomplaining skirts that could get 
 through the scratchiest holes in a hedge without tearing like 
 Nurse's, and blouses with blue fluttery ribbons, and peter- 
 sham waistbelts that would go twice round Laura if she 
 pulled hard, and a little straw hat like a schoolboy's. 
 And she hardly ever wore gloves. But on Sundays she 
 had a floppy thing with a rose in it and a great trailing 
 feather, and a beautiful brown frock, with red silk down 
 the front, that Laura called the robin dress. She could 
 sing like a robin too, high and sweet, and she knew all the 
 songs that had ever been sung, and had read all the books 
 that had ever been written, and could tell you all about 
 them all. She had a dear smiling face, and her hair was 
 so long that she could sit on it, just like Rapunzel, and 
 nobody could brush it as Laura did, because her mother, 
 twisting a little in her chair and making funny faces, often 
 said so. Her mother was always saying and doing funny 
 things: she could make Laura laugh by just looking at 
 her. Yet she was always properly serious over a dead 
 bird or a bumped forehead, and had a most soothing way 
 of making an armchair of lap and arm and shoulder for 
 Laura to curl up in till she felt better. 
 
 With Nurse she was simply magnificent. She had a very 
 of pretending that she wasn't afraid of her that made 
 Laura gasp. She had poured a glass of rhubarb and 
 magnesia into the slop-pail once, before Nurse's own eyes: 
 and had said, of course Laura might have the door of the 
 night-nursery left open if she wanted it why not ? though 
 she explained those shadows that dance upon the wall
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 13 
 
 privately to Laura afterwards, and so satisfactorily that 
 Laura was ready to withdraw her objection. 
 
 Yes, she was an understanding person. When they 
 drove out in the low pony-trap through the narrow lanes 
 that were hedged with damson trees, she never wondered 
 that Laura should want the long yellow straws that dangled 
 from the branches to show where a waggon-load of corn 
 had passed. She would stand up and rake them down 
 with her whip without more ado. She would stop half 
 a dozen times in half an hour to let Laura jump out and 
 pick herb-robert, or convolvulus, or ropes of briony, and 
 give advice as to the weaving of a wreath, and wear it 
 round her hat when it was done at whatever angle Laura 
 preferred, with an air that proved to Nurse and other 
 mothers that she wore it to please herself quite as much as 
 Laura. 
 
 And Laura, subconsciously, was aware that the mother 
 she worshipped, worshipped with equal frankness a small 
 daughter whom no one else found particularly attractive. 
 And it was possibly that knowledge that allowed the moth- 
 er's personality so to interknit with the daughter's, that 
 its uprooting came near to tearing out the child's heart 
 also. 
 
 Yet the alliance was so inevitable. There were the 
 twins, of course, but they were obviously Nurse's prop- 
 erty. They were fat, greedy, red-crested darlings, with 
 mottled arms and legs, and mouths that were always half 
 open like baby thrushes. Laura and her mother were very 
 fond of them, though Laura's attitude was prompted, I 
 fear, by the glory of sharing a responsibility with her 
 mother, rather than by sisterly devotion, for she was al- 
 ways persuasively protestant when Mrs. Valentine sug- 
 gested a visit to the nursery. 
 
 "My chick, we really wustf go and play with Wilfred and 
 James ! ' ' 
 
 "Oh, Mother! Ten minutes more! They're quite
 
 14 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 happy. They don't really want us, you know. Oh, 
 Mother, just another ten minutes ! Because, Mother 
 darling, dear Mother in the inside of the very inside of 
 your heart, you would rather read to me, wouldn 't you ? ' ' 
 
 "What? Bead to a whipper-snip like you, when the poor 
 little twins I never heard of such a thing ! ' ' And Moth- 
 er 's knees would give way suddenly and Laura, slipping to 
 the floor, would be tickled till she squealed. And when 
 she had had her ten minutes, full measure, Mother would 
 recollect herself guiltily, and hurrying upstairs, be very, 
 very kind to Wilfred and to James. But Laura, in dutiful 
 imitation, would yet be glancing, ever and again, from 
 Noah's Ark and pat-ball, to watch the beloved face, and 
 wait for a stray smile; and when it came her way, would 
 whisper to herself in fierce, delicious exultation 
 
 "But she's my mother most!" 
 
 You protest? You think such jealousy, such ecstasy, 
 unchildlike and fantastic ? And if not impossible in such a 
 baby, at least improbable and rather distressing ? And you 
 don't believe children are like that? I can't help it. You 
 ought to be right, but you are not. Laura was ' like that. ' 
 An unpleasant child? If you please. But her mother 
 never thought so. And if some premature instinct made 
 her, young as she was, so proud and jealous of her place 
 in her mother's heart, the instinct was, at least, a sure 
 one. For though many are to like her, and some to love, 
 never in all her life will she be first fiddle with any one 
 again. 
 
 Moreover her golden age was coming to its end. Not 
 suddenly, with a hushed house and red eyelids and the defi- 
 nite, numbing ritual of carriages and handkerchiefs and 
 hothouse flowers : not in a black day that would have 
 yawned like a gulf between Then and Now, a cleavage, defi- 
 nitely unbridgeable, on whose further brink Mother would 
 move ever more mistily, shrouded in hopeless glamour; 
 but imperceptibly, tenuously, in an ever lengthening spider- 
 thread of hope deferred.
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 15 
 
 For Mother had only gone away to get better ! She was 
 ill, because she had begun to wear little white shawls, al- 
 though it was summer-time, and sat still so much, and did 
 not pour away Nurse's medicines any more. So Laura 
 saved her sugar at tea-time for her mother, to take the 
 taste away. There was a day when Mother cried. Laura 
 had never known till then that mothers could cry. She 
 held her head and tried to be grown-up and comforting, but 
 she was secretly terrified, yet a little important too, because 
 Mother would not let any one be called, but lay quiet 
 against Laura's shoulder, just as Laura had so often lain 
 against hers. The next day, or week, or months, she could 
 never remember how long it was, her lazy mother had 
 breakfast in bed, and she was to be sent away to stay with 
 Gran 'papa Valentine. The twins were to be left behind. 
 ' ' Too young to understand, ' ' said Nurse significantly to the 
 parlour-maid. Understand what? She coaxed, implored, 
 stormed, for an explanation. Why shouldn't she stay, if 
 the twins did? She had not been naughty she had been 
 good, good! Mother wanted her. Mother couldn't want 
 the twins without her. Mother always wanted her. And 
 she wanted her mother she wanted her mother 
 
 She fought like a little wild cat while they dressed her, 
 in a fit of passionate anger that shook her small body as 
 wind shakes a bush, and that only her mother had ever been 
 able to control. There was a wildness about it that startled 
 even the stolid nurse, who could not guess at the forebod- 
 ing, the desperation that underlay the paroxysm, and was, 
 of course, as incomprehensible to the child herself as his 
 own despair to the dog who watches you pack your trunk. 
 
 It was the friendly parlour-maid who came to the rescue 
 with her cheerful 
 
 "Now, Miss Laura, you won't be let say good-bye to your 
 ma if you can 't be good ! ' ' 
 
 That quieted her, banished the unreasoning fear that had 
 been upon her of the hateful strength of her nurse's arms, 
 that at any peremptory moment might seize and bear her,
 
 16 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 struggling, helpless, into the wilderness where Mother was 
 not. She would not, could not, go without a word from her 
 mother, or a promise or a kiss. . . . But if she might say 
 good-bye why, the world had righted itself again! . . . 
 Mother would make all clear. . . . Mother would make all 
 right. . . . Could she go to Mother now? this directly 
 minute ? 
 
 She submitted herself to the maid (she would not go near 
 the nurse) and was re-arranged and smoothed and tidied, 
 and left at last at the bedroom door, with a final injunction 
 to be a good girl, and very quiet, and not stay long. 
 
 She shook off the maid's hand, and, awed a little in spite 
 of herself, slipped into the room. 
 
 She was so small that the foot of the big bedstead 
 blocked her vision like a wall, and for a blank moment she 
 thought the room empty. Then the clothes rustled faintly, 
 and emboldened she peeped round the post. There, sure 
 enough, lay her mother, her beautiful long plaits disor- 
 dered, an arm flung out weakly. 
 
 She clambered on to the bed and cast herself upon her 
 in an ecstasy of relief. 
 
 "Mother! Mother!" 
 
 Well, she had her half hour and was sent away com- 
 forted. Laura was to enjoy herself and be very good 
 and go on with her lessons and be kind to Wilfred and 
 James : and there should be letters, many letters, in a round 
 hand that Laura could read all by herself. And soon, very 
 soon, Mother would come and fetch her home and so 
 good-bye to Laura, her Laura, her own little girl 
 
 That is how Laura went to live at Brackenhurst with 
 Gran 'papa Valentine. 
 
 She got her letters, three of them, but no more, though 
 that was only because there was a new postman! But 
 though the twins followed her in a little while in white 
 overalls and black sashes, and the weeks went by, and 
 Laura grew daily more excited and impatient, her mother 
 never came to fetch her home.
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 IP they had only told her that her mother was dead ! 
 
 Death, Laura understood. There had been Ben, the be- 
 loved mongrel who was poisoned, and Grandmamma, and 
 birds, and once a kitten. Her mother had explained it all 
 to her at the time. Remembering, she would still have had, 
 in the shock, her mother to lean upon. And, especially to 
 a child, death's finality is its own anodyne. But nobody, 
 with that anxious English substitution of euphemism for 
 tact, ever used the bald word 'death.' Mother, she was 
 told, was alive and well and happy. She was living in 
 heaven with Jesus and Our Father. She knew everything 
 that Laura did, and one day, if Laura were good, she 
 would see her again. 
 
 Conceive the effect on a homesick baby with a super- 
 fluity of imagination, and a knowledge of life that would 
 have amused a London sparrow ! 
 
 It was simplicity itself to Laura. Mother might come at 
 any moment, and she would come, of course, from the 
 station, along the dusty high-road that swept past the end 
 of the lane and that you could see from the window of the 
 inviolate spareroom. Therefore, till her aunt, in desper- 
 ation, locked the door and hid the key, neither persuasion, 
 scolding, disgrace nor docked puddings, could, on rainy 
 days, keep a mulish Laura from curling up in the forbidden 
 window-seat to watch the distant strip with an air of ex- 
 pectancy that would have made that awaited mother's 
 heart ache. 
 
 The fine days were a more doubtful good. True, bound- 
 aries were enlarged, and from the end of the lane a wider 
 vista was under her observation, a white river on which 
 black, far-away specks were for ever swimming boatlike 
 
 17
 
 18 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 into ken, to swell and lengthen and lighten, at last, into 
 figures of men and women women in tweedy skirts and 
 blue ribbons and little straw hats, that were always Mother 
 until they were near. What mad terrier-rushes that high- 
 road saw, helter-skelter down the last hundred yards, and 
 what drag-foot returns and hot tears blinked away. 
 
 But fine weather brought worse things than disappoint- 
 ment. It brought the long daily walks, and picnics, some- 
 times, when an aunt who was doing her duty by roly-poly 
 nephews and a taciturn niece, thought it time for a treat. 
 And then would come the scenes, delays, excuses, direct 
 petition, and the final ' temper,' the white-hot rebellion 
 that exhausted alike the bored nursemaid and bewildered 
 aunt, and did indeed at first accomplish Laura's object of 
 being left behind. For, locked in the night-nursery to 
 consider its sins, the ha'porth of misery, perched on its 
 high chair like a tousled bird, would be fiercely rejoicing 
 that once more it had staved off catastrophe a mother ar- 
 riving and departing again while her little girl was out 
 for a walk. 
 
 But such a reason could not be explained to Aunt Adela, 
 "Who Smelt of Lanoline. 
 
 Laura hated Aunt Adela as she hated every one in those 
 first interminable months in that alien household. Her 
 all-satisfying intimacy with her mother had created in her 
 a habit of indifference to the rest of even her own tiny 
 world, and now, stranded among semi-strangers, she was 
 at first so shy and so fastidious that, in the happiest circum- 
 stances, it would have taken time before she learned how to 
 make or receive advances. But it is not easy to be polite 
 with a hidden trouble gnawing, like a fox, at one's vitals: 
 and Laura did not try over hard. For Laura, fighting for 
 her memories like a dog for its bones, with a more insidious 
 foe than honest Aunt Adela, had lost already much of her 
 treasure, dropping one by one as she struggled the pretty 
 ways her mother had taught her, and growing, in her bit- 
 ter loneliness, into a very wild apple of a small girl, over
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 19 
 
 whom aunt and household and visitors 'shook their heads 
 in despair. 
 
 She became, of course, as the months went by, outwardly 
 more amenable was tamed as a wolf-cub can be tamed, 
 into a semblance of domesticity. There came, at least, an 
 end to the flinging of a frantic body from side to side of 
 its cage. She bruised herself at last into a state of 
 acquiescence, and even learned to do tricks. But she 
 never forgot that she was trapped. Aunt Adela, taking 
 Wilfred and James to her well-meaning heart, would 
 wonder why it was so much more difficult to do her duty 
 by Laura. Laura had been naughty at first, but under her, 
 Adela 's, wise management she was certainly settling down. 
 Yet there was something about her that Adela found, she 
 hardly knew why, disturbing distressing even. "Why 
 couldn't Laura be more like other children? Why, for 
 instance, would she not make friends with the playfellows 
 of Adela 's anxious choice? A conscientious aunt might 
 well plume herself on the advantages she could confer 
 advantages that her late lamented, yet (between you and 
 her) eccentric sister-in-law had never troubled to procure 
 for an excessively spoiled daughter. There were the 
 Vicar's daughters such well-behaved children. There 
 were the two nieces of Brackenhurst's great man, old 
 Timothy Cloud, thrice Mayor of the neighbouring market 
 town before he died and had a stained glass window in 
 Brackenhurst parish church. And there was the son him- 
 self, young Justin Cloud, though he was at school of 
 course, and older, but nominally at least an ornament of a 
 most select little circle. 
 
 Above all there were the five little Mouldes, models of 
 deportment, with neat pinafores, and straight fair hair, 
 and white eyelashes, and noses moistly pink, like puppies. 
 Laura was expected to invite or to go to tea with them at 
 least once a week, though it soon appeared that the visits 
 needed Aunt Adela 's eye to be even superficially successful. 
 Only Aunt Adela 's eye could prevent Laura from retiring
 
 20 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 under the nearest bed with a book, and refusing to budge 
 till it was time for herself or her visitors to depart. It 
 enraged Laura that the accident of age should mark her 
 down for friendship with Annabel Moulde, a sly, skinny 
 child to whom Aunt Adela invariably referred as "A 
 little mother. So good to all her brothers and sisters." 
 As if Laura didn't try to be good to "Wilfred and James 
 when Aunt Adela wasn't looking! . . . Because it was 
 for Mother . . . because she had promised . . . not to 
 please Aunt Adela . . . not to show off like Annabel . . . 
 Laura despised Annabel for her ostentatious virtue and 
 her meagre bookshelf Queechy, Ministering Children, 
 Melbourne House, Jessica's First Prayer. . . . She was ex- 
 pected to be friends with a little girl who enjoyed yes, 
 enjoyed reading Jessica's First Prayer! Yet Annabel, 
 unconsciously, had done her a good turn ; for Laura, burst- 
 ing with the humorous horror of that discovery, had been 
 impelled to break her habit of silence to impart the joke, 
 tentatively, to Gran 'papa Valentine and Gran 'papa, over 
 his spectacles and his Boswell, had been surprised into a 
 chuckle, and a stirring of interest in a grand-daughter to 
 whose credit he had heard little, and, conversation develop- 
 ing, had ended, to their mutual amazement, in bestowing 
 upon her the freedom of his sitting-room and his biscuit 
 tin, and certain of his unlocked bookshelves. After which 
 there was, at least, always Gran 'papa! 
 
 Gran 'papa's room was the pleasantest in the house 
 small, square and cosy. The furniture was of some yellow- 
 ish wood, glassy with polish, and there was a chequered 
 crimson tablecloth and, summer and winter, a dancing yel- 
 low fire. The window was always open, and the fresh 
 warmed air smelt faintly of biscuits and tobacco and old 
 bindings. The pictures on the walls hung orderly, in 
 couples, Landseer engravings and framed coloured casts of 
 trout; for Gran 'papa was a fisheman. He was a fiddler 
 too, though here zeal outran discretion. His violin was 
 wrapped away in silk and velvet, like a lady, and Laura
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 1 
 
 was never quite sure that it was not, say first cousin? to 
 the fairy fiddle in Grimm's. She longed to experiment. 
 There was the big desk with ink and seals and wax, and 
 neat papers innumerable, and a pot with marigolds or mi- 
 gnonette, and always there was sunshine and the bad-tem- 
 pered canary, that would dash at you from its open cage, 
 with peckings and shrill squeaks of jealous rage, till 
 Gran 'papa whistled, when it would perch upon his finger 
 or his skull-cap, and slowly condense from a passionate 
 puff-ball into an elegant little gentleman in lemon yellow 
 breeches and snuff-coloured swallow-tails, with an eye so 
 fixed and bright that you could swear it wore a monocle. 
 
 A memory to bring a lump into a grandchild's throat, 
 the picture of stern old Gran 'papa, with his whole edifice 
 of dignity built up so solidly, from his square-toed boots 
 and speckless broadcloth and his grey satin tie with its 
 pearl pin, to his curly beard and cold blue eyes, and the 
 unnecessary skull-cap upon his splendid white head, fan- 
 tastically topped by a scolding bull-canary. A grown-up 
 Laura, looking back, a long way back, might begin, be- 
 latedly, to miss a half -forgotten Gran 'papa, might wonder 
 whether, after all, she had sufficiently appreciated him, 
 realize with a sigh that she had learned in those young 
 years to love him as sincerely and coldly and faithfully as 
 he had loved her; though 'love' was not a word that Laura 
 could imagine Gran 'papa using, any more than she could 
 hear him saying, 'pretty girl' when he meant, he emphati- 
 cally meant, 'an elegant young female.' Even 'young 
 woman' would have been a concession for Gan 'papa's nice 
 ear. Just so, Laura 's phrase would have been tempered by 
 Gran 'papa to 'affection,' 'esteem,' 'respect.' And there 
 she would have agreed with him again, for she certainly 
 respected him profoundly. And he, secretly, respected 
 her, because in her he could recognize his own keen, fas- 
 tidious spirit. Emotionally, they were at opposite poles, 
 but intellectually they were allies with kindred tastes and 
 kindred minds. Not kindred souls there they parted
 
 32 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 company; for where Laura's affection could invariably be 
 trusted to blind her to the most obvious flaws, the testing 
 tool of her grandfather's hypercritical taste had left him, 
 at the end of a long life, with no object worth loving at 
 all save Laura. That Laura, his flesh and blood, had 
 something of his own grey matter in her head too, was a 
 secret delight to him: and by the time he was eighty and 
 she eighteen, Laura had discovered that secret and how, in 
 consequence, to wind him, for all his tetchiness, round her 
 finger. But that is at yet eight or nine years ahead, and 
 Laura only beginning to discover that in Gran 'papa's room, 
 at Gran 'papa's lowest bookshelf, she could sometimes for- 
 get to wonder if Mother would come this afternoon. 
 
 Gran 'papa 's bookshelf was crammed with volumes so tall 
 and heavy that to pull one out was breathless work, and to 
 lift it a greater feat than lifting the coal-scuttle or Wilfred 
 who weighed three stone. They had to be read by a 
 literary Laura reposing on her stomach, her legs waving 
 airily, her elbows so chafed and reddened by the harsh car- 
 pet and her own weight, that they are to this day her worst 
 point. Which is the reason, Collaborator, if the matter has 
 bothered you, that Laura, even at that dinner-party we 
 shall attend sooner or later, never wore really short sleeves. 
 
 But the books were worth it, even to the later Laura at 
 her most feminine hour when Justin, unprompted, had 
 admired her frock and said, not joking, that he liked red 
 hair. (Truly he said so!) For the books were an edu- 
 cation, and an education is more useful than pretty elbows 
 when one has a Justin for whom to stand tiptoe. 
 
 But to the early Laura, with her mother half lost and 
 Justin not yet found, they were not education but 
 Nepenthe Nepenthe and the Fields. 
 
 There was Herodotus, and The Swiss Family Robinson, 
 and Gulliver's Travels; Pamela, and a first edition of Alice 
 (Gran 'papa approved of Tenniel) and three or four single 
 poems, each a book to itself, with a profusion of bright- 
 coloured illustrations Gilpin, The Elegy on a Mad Dog,
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 23 
 
 The Three Jovial Hunstmen, and Laura's favourite, So 
 She went into the Garden to get a Cabbage Leaf. There 
 was the Churchman's Family Bible, with Adam in 
 voluminous goatskin draperies, and Eve with hair like 
 Mother, and square capital letters at the beginning of 
 chapters with tiny pictures filled into them. There were 
 the Cruikshanks huge albums into which Gran 'papa had 
 pasted every print or drawing of his favourite artist that 
 he had come across in fifty magpie years. And there was 
 Mr. Punch, immortal Mr. Punch, endless volumes of him, 
 inexhaustible, a mine of delight, and the true explanation 
 of the singular and detailed acquaintance with Victorian 
 politics with which Laura of the tenacious memory could, 
 on occasion, confound an opponent. Pouring over the 
 cartoons, devouring the antiquated letter-press as only a 
 small child can, she had bewildered Aunt Adela one day 
 on a visit to Madame Tussaud, by her delighted recognition 
 of group after group of Her Majesty's Ministers who had 
 died before she was born. She adored Lord Salisbury, for 
 instance, and pitied him deeply for losing his wife, for she 
 had him thoroughly entangled with The Lord of Burleigh. 
 But her favourites were naughty Randolph, the mustachioed 
 schoolboy, being very rude to Mr. Gladstone, and 'Joey,' 
 whose speeches in that last tragic tour she cut out and kept 
 and learned by heart, and would declaim unweariedly to 
 the looking-glass and the indifferent twins, and who was 
 nevertheless inextricably confused in her teeming, un- 
 focussed mind with her one delirious pantomime and Mr. 
 Alfred Jingle. 
 
 ' "Worship was even then, I suppose, a necessity of her 
 nature, and, her chief altar veiled, her mind was in process 
 of becoming a pantheon, in which Jane Eyre and 
 Jephthah's daughter, Mary Stuart and Napoleon (it 
 shocked her intensely that Gran 'papa could refer to him 
 familiarly as 'Boney') shared incense with Wamba son 
 of Witless, and Admiral Byng, and poor Arachne, who did 
 sew better than Minerva anyhow ! For Laura 's gods were
 
 24 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 generally selected for their misfortunes' sake. She had 
 the instinct for lost causes: would always be the loyalest 
 of rebels. Indeed her early and equal passion for John 
 Milton and Marie Corelli was occasioned by the fact that 
 here, at least, were two who could appreciate a poor devil 's 
 good points. If Laura could have had Providence under 
 her orders for but one busy hour, how topsy-turvily per- 
 fect the world would have rolled on again, with never a 
 discrowned king nor a carrotless donkey nor a motherless 
 eight-year-old in all its boundaries. Her baby sorrows had 
 intensified her inborn sympathy with any ill-treated thing, 
 and, as the leaves began to fall in that first lonely autumn, 
 she would fling small, motherly arms round the shivering 
 poplar on the lawn as she passed it, and hug it and warm 
 it, with defiant glances at the comfortable fir trees and 
 well-dressed laurels: would rescue dying flowers from the 
 bonfire, and worms from the birds, and birds from the 
 pussy-cat : and when she found a tell-tale hole and a nibbled 
 book in Gran 'papa's bookshelf she was quite as anxious as 
 the mouse to preserve the secret. Can you see Laura, 
 Collaborator, breathing heavily with excitement, eye and 
 ear cocked against detection, guiltily dropping stolen cheese 
 down that mouse's tunnel before she corked it up and 
 turned with equally eager sympathy to the smoothing of 
 the poor torn book, and so, incidentally, to her reward? 
 For in that brown, ancient book, with its long s's and its 
 wood-cuts and its map, she found the information that 
 neither Gran 'papa nor Nurse nor Aunt Adela would give 
 her, nothing more or less than a definite description of her 
 mother's new home, and full directions as to how Laura 
 was to get there. 
 
 She and the mouse had happened, in short, upon an early 
 edition of The Pilgrim's Progress.
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 IF you had asked Laura what heaven was like, she would 
 have answered, almost involuntarily " 'A bald head/ ' 
 and Wilfred and James would have tumbled over each 
 other in their anxiety to join in the chorus " 'Because it 
 is a bright and shining place where there is no parting/ " 
 and to watch the effect upon you of that dazzling joke. 
 
 But after the twins came to live at Brackenhurst, Laura 
 laid a taboo upon it. One might joke with Mother, but to 
 joke about her, about anything connected with her, was 
 sacrilege. Heaven, the twins were once and for all to 
 understand, was not in the least like a bald head. It was 
 in the Bible, a very beautiful place, a sort of hospital, and 
 Mother was staying there just now to get well, and if 
 Wilfred or James ever mentioned that riddle again, Laura 
 would tell Jesus about it when she said her prayers, and 
 Jesus would tell Mother, and Mother would not bring them 
 one little bit of chocolate when she came back. (You see, 
 she was learning already how to manage her men-folk.) 
 The twins were impressed and obedient; yet the phrase, 
 more illuminating than all Aunt Adela's theology, stuck 
 in their minds, and as no child attempts to imagine an ab- 
 straction, Laura's bright and shining heaven lived on in 
 hers as a pile of summer clouds lined with pink and silver, 
 on which Mother lay as on a bed, with her beautiful long 
 plaits disordered and her arm flung out weakly. 
 
 In haymaking time, when Laura was tired of cocking 
 hay for the twins to pull down again, and the lemonade 
 and bread-and-dripping had vanished, and the jolly sun, 
 like Bacchus on a barrel, sat astride the midday sky, the 
 indefatigable twins would trot away on their private 
 business that was not unconnected with forbidden straw- 
 
 25
 
 26 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 berry beds, and Laura, lying on her back in the uncut hay, 
 would stare up through the sorrel and the toddling grass, 
 and the tall daisies, and watch the slow clouds coming up 
 like ships over the edge of the world, and screw up her 
 eyes till there were little white crowsfeet in the tan, to 
 peer the better at each dazzling brightness that might be 
 heaven itself for all she knew. Sometimes the cloud line 
 was broken by a wisp of vapour, and then Laura tried to 
 be sure that it was her mother's thin hand waving to her 
 from over the edge of heaven. But she was never quite 
 sure. 
 
 Generally the clouds it was a summer of northerly 
 winds came sailing up over a slope whose crest of beeches, 
 a mile away, flanked Green Gates and the road; so that 
 when she discovered The Pilgrim's Progress, and a drift- 
 ing cloud-heaven had become a stationary Ccelestial City, 
 it was behind Beech Hill that it lay, and towards Beech 
 Hill that, suddenly grown acquiescent in the matter of 
 walks and picnics, she would urge the nurse and the peram- 
 bulator : and it was on the sky-line beyond Beech Hill that 
 she and Christian did at last, one autumn day, see it shin- 
 ing. For though she poured over the unfamiliar print till 
 her eyes ached, it was autumn before she had mastered the 
 book and her instructions, and could prepare for her own 
 private expedition. 
 
 It was Christian's fault: he simply wouldn't be hurried. 
 Stumbling along beside him over the difficult words, she 
 was out of patience twenty times a day with his credulous, 
 open-mouthed simplicity. He was no better than Wilfred 
 and James who always believed every word that the coach- 
 man told them, or the gardener's boy, or the chattering, 
 black-eyed Frenchmen who came to the yard on Saturdays 
 to sell onions. She had no patience with them or with con- 
 versational Christian, wasting his time and losing his way. 
 Did he think that she, Laura, would have been taken in like 
 that, over and over again, by Vain Confidence and Flat- 
 terer and Mr. Worldly Wiseman f Why, the very names
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 27 
 
 were enough to put even the twins on their guard, and 
 Christian was grown-up! Byways Meadow there she ac- 
 knowledged that she too might have strayed: she hankered 
 after little cross-country paths herself, though Nurse and 
 Aunt Adela always insisted on the dull, dusty, put-on-your- 
 gloves high-road; but she would never have pounded off 
 to Sinai, or stood by the hour arguing and disputing and 
 contradicting about unintelligible things like Carnal 
 Cogitations and The Carcafe of Religion, long before she 
 had got to heaven and found Mother. 
 
 But though Christian would go his own gait, and skip- 
 ping was unsafe because the adventure were tucked away 
 among the arguments like strawberries in a bed of leaves, 
 he did at last bring her past the Enchanted Ground (dis- 
 appointingly unproductive of fairies) to the Land of 
 Beulah and a clear view of the Coslestial City itself. 
 
 Absorbed Laura, curled-up by Gran 'papa's fire on that 
 clear October morning, reading of the Reflexion of the sun 
 on the City (for the City was of pure gold) and dutifully 
 looking up Rev. xxi. 28, had just stumbled upon a more 
 marvellous heaven than even Bunyan drew, when the 
 nursemaid, as it always happened, pounced upon her and 
 brushed her and buttoned her and gloved her and stuck a 
 hat upon her and hurried her off for a walk, too dazed to 
 protest, with her head full of rivers of life and fruit trees 
 and gates that were one pearl (like Mother's ring) and 
 strange, intoxicating, unpronounceable names the third, 
 chalcedony, and the seventh, chrysolite, and the eighth, 
 beryl. She was far too absorbed to notice the way they 
 went, and Wilfred and James were pelting each other with 
 fallen leaves, and Nurse was leaning panting against the 
 perambulator, before she realized that they had climbed 
 the long Beech Hill Road that Nurse disliked because it 
 was steep and lonely, but which, as the highest point of the 
 highest village in a hilly county, did certainly satisfy 
 Aunt Adela 's belief in fresh air. 
 
 She stripped off her gloves, dreamily accepting her good-
 
 28 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 luck, and leaving the nurse to spread rugs beneath the 
 little wooden seat, and unwrap the biscuits and the bottle 
 of milk, she wandered off aimlessly through the sun- 
 splashed grove, her thoughts still caught like flies in a web 
 of make-believe, yet aware and enjoying with all her sensi- 
 tive little soul the gallantry of the autumn morning. 
 
 It was a perfect day. Its colours shone through the clear 
 air like*pebbles freshened in water, and away upon the 
 sky-line the threadlike roads and midget trees were as 
 cleanly defined as the great trunks of the beeches them- 
 selves, that stood, brown and naked and stately, like a 
 troop of tall savages, against the brilliant sky. Overhead 
 the jolly wind that lived on the hill-top and never went 
 to sleep, was hard at work as usual, scattering the clouds 
 in every direction, like a bad dog frightening sheep, tug- 
 ging and tearing at the beech boughs, and sending down 
 the last of the leaves in golden gusts into the deep pits at 
 the roots of the trees, that were half filled already by 
 generations of leaves, and were as safe and soft to jump 
 into as a feather-bed. Laura, forced into a trot and then 
 a run, was caught up at last in a sudden scamper of twigs 
 and dust and stray leaves, and whirled along till she felt 
 as if she were flying, and clutched at a trail of bramble to 
 steady herself and get her breath; but the peremptory 
 wind would have no lagging, and, catching at her little 
 round hat, lifted it off her head and trundled it along in 
 front of her like a schoolboy dribbling a football, till they 
 were clear of the trees, when it turned tail in its sudden 
 whimsical way, leaving the hat upon the ground and Laura 
 panting beside it. 
 
 For some slow, pleasant minutes she lay still, listening 
 to the footsteps of the wind and her own heart-beats, with 
 her cheek pressed close to the thymy earth, still be- 
 sprinkled, late as it was, with milk-wort and rest-harrow 
 and yellow sparks of tonnentil, that glimmered like flung 
 match-ends in fuel that was a clump of spent brown 
 heather. The bright, thin sunshine settled lightly upon
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 29 
 
 her like a gossamer scarf or a baby's breath upon your 
 cheek before it kisses you. Through shut eyes she enjoyed 
 the spacious peace of the hill-top, and the delicate warmth 
 seemed a physical expression of the sensation of well- 
 being that was stealing over her, a sensation that, in the 
 old days, had been but another word for her mother's 
 presence. The wind, raging again in the beech-grove, was 
 a turbulent giant guarding the entrance to enchanted lands : 
 its far-away fury heightened the impression of expectant 
 silence. Through her pleasant drowsiness she had an odd 
 feeling that something, something important, was about to 
 happen. 
 
 Lazily she sat up and looked about her. 
 
 She had never before strayed further than their shadows' 
 length from the beeches: the low-banked trench, where 
 the twins played 'King of the Castle' and the sheep hud- 
 dled against the rain, had fenced off adventure. But to- 
 day she and the wind had cleared it in a flying leap and 
 had run out to the very edge of the wide level table-land 
 that had bounded her view, and before her lay unknown 
 valleys and ridges, valleys and ridges, rolling away to the 
 sky-line like waves of the sea. 
 
 And on the sky-line itself, trembling between earth and 
 heaven as if it were a great diamond swinging on a silver 
 chain, hung a glancing, shimmering translucency in the 
 shape of a house a castle a king's pavilion with a 
 central arch that glistered like a high priest's breast-plate, 
 and twin towers reflecting the sun in glints and rays and 
 flashes of white and golden light. 
 
 For a long minute Laura sat motionless, staring staring. 
 Then her heat began to beat so wildly that she felt the 
 thud of it as a sharp pain, and her cold little fingers dug 
 and clutched at the soft turf. She could hardly breathe: 
 she was choking, drowning in the flood of joy that swirled 
 over her like waters set free. She sat, white and sick 
 with ecstasy, her eyes devouring the miracle, while in her 
 ears remembered phrases pealed like wedding bells.
 
 30 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 The Reflexion of the Sun upon the City. . . . 
 
 . . . and the city was of pure gold, like unto pure 
 glass. . . . 
 
 ... a bright and shining place, where there is no part- 
 ing. . . . 
 
 Her light was like unto a stone most precious, as it were 
 a jasper stone, clear as crystal. . . . 
 
 The uncounted minutes tiptoed past. 
 
 She spoke at last, in a little whispering voice 
 
 "I've found it," said Laura. ''It's here. It was here 
 all the time. And Mother ' 
 
 She counted the easy ridges that seemed so clear and 
 near, traced, with a finger that quivered, the merry white 
 road playing bo-peep in and out of the woods. 
 
 "They're the Delectable Mountains," said Laura. "Of 
 course, the Delectable Mountains and the Coslestial City. 
 And I can get there by tea-time. If I run if I don 't stop 
 once oh, Mother, I can get to you by tea-time. ' '
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 THOUGH its anticipation and memory can fill a lifetime, 
 the actual emotion must inevitably measure its intensity by 
 its brevity. Ecstasy and despair, those hill-tops of human 
 experience, can offer, in the nature of things, no abiding 
 place for a pilgrim's feet. 
 
 With the return of the mere capacity for thought, Laura 
 declined rapidly from her timeless bliss into a mood of 
 active, bustling pleasure. A thousand devices and antici- 
 pations flitted through her mind as, in feverish excitement, 
 she mapped out the day. 
 
 She would start at once, as soon as she had satisfied 
 Nurse by appearing for milk and biscuits. . . . She and the 
 twins were accustomed to wander, within limits, as they 
 pleased . . . She would be over the hill and away by the 
 time Nurse was repacking the perambulator, and when she 
 was missed, who would guess where she had gone? . . . 
 At least, she was not so sure of that. ... It was very 
 strange that Nurse and Aunt Adela had never said a word 
 about heaven being so close to Brackenhurst. ... It 
 looked as if they were afraid of her finding out ... as if 
 they didn't want her to see Mother. . . . She clenched her 
 fist. If they tried to stop her now ! . . . They had better 
 not try, that was all! But she would not give them a 
 chance. . . . She would not let them guess that she knew 
 anything. . . . She, too, could pretend ignorance, even if 
 she had to tell a story over it. ... Mother couldn't bear 
 you to tell stories but this was different. . . . She would 
 explain it all to Mother, and of course Mother would under- 
 stand. . . . Oh, the blessedness of being back with Mother 
 who always understood! 
 
 31
 
 32 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 She was so absorbed in her meditations that the nurse- 
 maid could approach unheard. 
 
 "Miss Laura, are you deaf? 'Ere I've calling till I'm 
 'oarse. Come along, do, you naughty child, an' 'ave your 
 biscuits. It's eleven or more you won't eat no lunch if 
 you leave 'em so late. Come along. What are you staring 
 at?" 
 
 Laura's eyes were as blank as a cat's. She waved her 
 hand airily as she scrambled to her feet. 
 
 "That over there. What's that that shining house, 
 Nurse?" 
 
 " Green 'ouse, I expect." Nurse screwed up her eyes 
 and followed the direction of Laura 's grubby finger. ' ' Oh, 
 that! That's the Crystal Pallis. It stands very 'igh, you 
 know. As 'igh as us, almost. Miss Laura, on'y look at 
 your 'ands. Reely ! A terrier 'd 'ave more sense. If Miss 
 Adela meets us " 
 
 The Crystal Palace! As beautiful a name as any other 
 for a Ccxlestial City. . . . 
 
 "Have you seen it before, Nurse?" 
 
 "Lord, yes any fine day. Must 'ave a fine day, of 
 course. I wonder I 'aven 't shown it you. I come at night 
 
 once with my friend to see the fireworks. My friend, 
 > e " 
 
 Laura broke in. She knew all about Nurse's friend. 
 
 "Please to remember Fifth of November?" She was 
 puzzled. 
 
 "Not only then. Any night. Lights up all the sky 
 blues and reds, like joolry. Lovely. I'd like to see it 
 close to." 
 
 "Why may any one go there?" asked Laura casually 
 as they walked towards the beeches. But her indifference 
 was the quivering indifference of a well-trained dog on 
 trust before a lump of sugar. 
 
 "Lord, yes! Mother went once." 
 
 "Your mother? Tour mother too? Did she?" 
 
 "Yes. She went once. Brock's Benefit. Fine time she
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 33 
 
 'ad too. Come along, Miss Laura." She took her by her 
 unwilling hand. "You can look at it after. It won't run 
 away. ' ' 
 
 "Was it What was it like, Nurse?" 
 
 "Well it's all glass, you know." 
 
 "Yes, I know," said Laura. "Like pure gold 
 
 Many gates?" 
 
 "Oh, I dunno " 
 
 "Twelve, should you think?" 
 
 "I dessay. It's a big place. What, Miss Laura?" 
 
 "Twelve thousand furlongs," Laura was murmuring. 
 She raised her voice. ' ' What else, Nursie ? ' ' 
 
 "Oh, there's fountains and parrots and stalls with joolry 
 that brooch of mine come from there " (it was a sham 
 moonstone that Laura and Nurse agreed in thinking 
 superb) "and gardens something lovely. Orange trees, 
 my mother said, and trees with tulips on 'em." 
 
 She was thinking of magnolias, but Laura, lover of 
 flowers, drew a deep breath, thrilling to a vision of the 
 tallest tree on Beech Hill parti-coloured to its topmost twig 
 with the tulips you buy in shops, long-stemmed, scarlet 
 and purple, half a crown a dozen. 
 
 "Oh, Nurse!! And was there a river, Nurse?" 
 
 "Oh, yes runs right through the grounds, with animals 
 on the islands what d'you call 'em antiluviums awful- 
 looking beasts. Gave my mother the creeps, they did." 
 
 Laura nodded, but she was not impressed. She knew 
 them. She and Christian had known them in the Valley of 
 the Shadow and had taken no harm. Yet to assure herself 
 she asked 
 
 "What are they like? Is it difficult to get past them?" 
 
 "Why, Miss Laura, they're not real beasts. On'y stone. 
 Just antiluviums. Sort of stone dragons, you know." 
 
 "Oh, I see." Laura nodded again as one enlightened. 
 She was acquainted with the Dragon, too, and the Beast; 
 had met them at church. . . . They were bound for a thou- 
 sand years. . . . Turning into stone was a very good way
 
 84 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 of binding them. . . . She gave a great sigh of content. It 
 was simply wonderful how everything fitted in. ... 
 
 I beg your pardon, Collaborator? You think it curious 
 that the conversation should have been such a satisfaction 
 to her? 
 
 But why? Her Ccelestial City hardly needed a nurse- 
 maid's recognition? 
 
 Oh, I see. I see what you mean. But then you are 
 arguing as a ' grown-up. ' We grown-ups, of course, believe 
 or disbelieve black or white one thing or the other and 
 there 's an end of it. But this is a child. A child can recon- 
 cile look back, Collaborator implicit belief and frank 
 scepticism in a way that, to us, is all but incomprehensible. 
 A child will show you a fairy ring without dreaming that it 
 can be anything but the track of elfin feet, yet will in- 
 stantly and vigorously denounce as a story-teller the con- 
 temporary who claims to have seen the Little People at 
 their dancing. Fantasy and Common Sense sit see-saw in 
 those early years, and keep a wonderful balance ; but when 
 the lanky 'teens add their weight it is generally Common 
 Sense that comes to earth with a thud, while poor Fantasy 
 is jerked sky high and lost for good among the stars: 
 which is a pity. 
 
 Do you understand now why Laura who will always 
 keep that balance, I believe, however old she grows could, 
 with only the Kent hills between her and heaven, be yet 
 distinctly relieved that Nurse's mother had been there be- 
 fore her, and that children were half price? Fantasy, 
 you see, like a fairy sixpence, had been rung upon the 
 counter of Nurse's mother's experiences and pronounced 
 coin of the realm. 
 
 Laura but I wish you wouldn 't interrupt, Collaborator ! 
 I lose the thread. You shall censor it all afterwards, but 
 first let me talk myself out. And it is not polite to mur- 
 mur "Impossible" pointedly to your pointed knitting 
 needles ! 
 
 But Laura, all this while, has sat meekly between the
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 35 
 
 twins, eating her biscuits, a good little grubby-handed girl. 
 
 She was always good when she was left alone, as the new 
 nurse had at last discovered ; so when the biscuits had been 
 eaten and the children dismissed to another hour's play 
 before going home, it was with the twins that Nurse's 
 paperback shared her attention, rather than with Laura, 
 slipping away so quietly that her little thin dark body and 
 red-brown head wavering in and out of the big trunks was 
 scarcely to be distinguished from a slim beech sapling 
 a-sway in the wind. Nurse would have settled down to her 
 reading with less composure if she could have seen beyond 
 the screen of trees, have caught Laura's backward glances, 
 half scared, half triumphant, as she gained the open hill- 
 top, and her odd proceedings when she decided that she 
 was out of every one's inquisitive sight. 
 
 For Laura, the careless, the untidy, the hard-on-her- 
 clothes, swayed, I suppose, by some broken memory of kind 
 hands pinching up her ribbons and smoothing her curls, of 
 eyes very proud and critical of their Laura, was first and 
 fastidiously concerned with her appearance. She rubbed 
 her hands as clean as she could on the grass, fastened a 
 careless button, pulled up her stockings and adjusted her 
 suspenders. Mother hated wrinkly stockings. . . . She 
 tightened her hair ribbon, straining her hair off her face 
 till her eyes nearly jumped out of her head, and did her 
 best to brush the long locks, that the wind had whipped 
 into rats '-tails, round and round her finger into the sau- 
 sages that grown-ups desire. She took off her shoes and 
 shook out the sand and bits of leaf, and tied them in the 
 complicated tangle that Laura believed to be a 'Louise' 
 knot, because it never under an circumstances came un- 
 done. Indeed, it needed scissors in the evening. Finally 
 she took out her purse, poured the hoard into her lap and 
 counted it breathlessly. A penny, three halfpennies, two 
 farthings, and the threepenny bit that she had had given 
 her to put in the plate on that fortunate Sunday when 
 there had not, after all, been a collection. Sixpence ex-
 
 36 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 actly. Children were half price, so sixpence exactly could 
 smuggle you through gates of pearl into your mother's 
 lap. 
 
 She took a last look at the patch-work country, noted 
 once again the lie of the road through the valley below, 
 and then, with a little gasp like a bather taking the plunge, 
 took to her heels and ran down the hill-side.
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 How long a day can be! An hour or less so much less 
 than an hour how it can lie in one's memory like an in- 
 terminable road, when pleasant years are more forgotten 
 than towns passed in the train. How long a little time can 
 be! Once I saw a woman not Laura grow old between 
 a question and an answer between the opening and the 
 shutting of a door. 
 
 Laura, at ten or twelve, would usher in a reminiscence 
 with "When I was a little girl," and look bewildered if 
 you laughed. "When I was young," said Laura, as inno- 
 cently, at seventeen. And each time Laura would be 
 thinking of that Age of Gold and Crystal Palaces, with 
 Mother at the beginning, and at the end of it Justin. 
 And yet, less of it than of the four-hour Odyssey that closes 
 her childhood, that cuts her memories in two and provides 
 you with the spectacle, comical, pathetic, or merely curious, 
 as it happens to strike you, of a proved soul waiting 
 wearily, amid school books and pig-tails and lengthening 
 skirts, amid vanities and ignorances and experiments, for 
 body and brain to grow up to it. 
 
 Those four hours joyfully down dale and up hill to 
 another glimpse of a receding heaven, and then down dale 
 again, not quite so springily those four hours Laura never 
 forgot. Each incident of the road the stumble-stone that 
 cut her knee : a bolting rabbit startling itself and her, and 
 the fat thrush cracking a snail on her first milestone: a 
 stony-faced house seen through laurels that encircled it 
 stiffly like an Elizabethan ruff: meteoric motor-cars that 
 frightened her into ditches, and once a nettle-bed: that 
 black wood where, through dead leaves, her own shadow 
 had stalked ghoulishly behind her, upon feet that were 
 
 37
 
 38 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 the echoes of her own; the sun-pool of a chalk-pit, trail- 
 ing and tropical, like pictures in the Swiss Family Robin- 
 son, with mighty garlands of old-man's beard: a village 
 pond with ducks and slime and dragon-flies: babies on 
 door-steps, and shrill women: sharp-horned staring cows: 
 dust and sunshine and the terrible tramps each and all 
 had been etched indelibly upon a mind that excitement had 
 made more than ever sensitive to impressions. 
 
 She picked a bunch of flowers as she trotted along, for a 
 mother who would appreciate them. They were fruit trees 
 in heaven, of course, with leaves for the healing of the 
 nations, like the eucalyptus tree, she supposed, on the 
 vicarage front lawn; but Rev. xxii said nothing about 
 flowers. "Too much pavement," thought Laura, the 
 gardener. She supposed that even if grass tried to seed 
 itself in the dust of the cracks the dust would be gold. . . . 
 There couldn't be much nourishment in gold-dust. . . . 
 Anyhow, here was one of Mother's own autumn bunches 
 for her, pulled from the dear chalk soil an exquisite dis- 
 order of oat-grass and hips-and-haws, late sprigs of yellow- 
 wort between the scabious cushions, like stars on a lilac 
 sky, with oak-apples and bleached heather and fans of 
 scarlet bracken all put together by the skilful, flower- 
 loving hands she had inherited from her mother. 
 
 A bigger part than she realized of her first light-footed 
 hour had gone in the picking of them. The end of the 
 second saw her passing a village bakery, with a wistful 
 eye on the stack of loaves and bars of mouldy chocolate 
 behind the blurred, thick panes. She hesitated as, through 
 the open door, the round, red-rimmed baker's clock told 
 her, between hiccoughs, that it was half-past two and that 
 she was hungry. So hungry, indeed, that for a moment 
 her fingers closed on the purse at the bottom of her pocket. 
 A penny, three half-pennies, two farthings and a three- 
 penny bit . . . Sixpence . . . Gran 'papa's Euclid him- 
 self couldn't make it more than sixpence. . . . No, she 
 mustn't. . . . Yet there was such virtue in a ha'penny
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 39 
 
 bun a round, shiny, sticky, steamy, curranty ha'penny 
 bun! She supposed it wouldn't do if she offered St. 
 Peter fivepence halfpenny and explained? If only St. 
 John had the keys. ... St. John would let her in at once, 
 she felt sure. But St. Peter? He might, of course . . . 
 but perhaps it was wiser not to risk it. ... When she got 
 to Mother there would be tea, tea without bread-and-butter 
 first, the kind of tea Aunt Adela never knew. . . . Mother 
 would see to that. . . . She could wait. . . . She wasn't so 
 awfully hungry. . . . 
 
 She turned resolutely from temptation and hurried on. 
 
 But she was no longer dancing effortlessly along like a 
 kitten or a whirled leaf: her haste had become deliberate 
 and would soon be painful. She was growing infallible 
 sign of exhaustion conscious of her body: conscious that 
 her back was aching ; that she was thirsty as well as hungry ; 
 that, through her sand shoes, the surface of the road 
 knubbed her wincing feet. She carried her bunch of 
 flowers, drooping, too, by this time, across her. shoulder to 
 ease her tired arm, but they were very heavy. Such a 
 great big bunch but then Laura, her life long, will always 
 undertake a little more than she can manage. 
 
 Above her the unconquered hill-road stretched as steep 
 and long and high as Jack's Beanstalk. She climbed it 
 wearily, bargaining herself upward 
 
 "I will go to the second bend, up to the white birch. If 
 I do it in a hundred steps I will stop a minute. If I do it 
 in ninety steps I will stop two minutes. ' ' 
 
 But it was always more than a hundred steps for sand 
 shoes, and so, honourably, though her breathless little body 
 were rocking, she would not stop. 
 
 She reached the top at last, too hot from walking to 
 flinch at the shock of the wind, or to notice that the sun 
 had gone in: and found her goal again twin towers and 
 arched body yet so strangely altered in an afternoon, 
 that, as she looked, she gave a cry of dismay. It had been 
 so near, so clear, a parrot 's flight from Beech Hill, but now,
 
 40 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 withdrawn to an immense distance, it rose without a glitter 
 from the iron rim of the world, a grey, frozen blur upon 
 the sullen sky. 
 
 She stared fearfully. 
 
 She couldn't . . . she hadn't . . . she couldn't have 
 made a mistake ? . . . Yet what had happened ? . . . What 
 in the name of enchantment had happened to the Crystal 
 Palace, the Caelestial City, the bright and shining 
 heaven? . . . 
 
 Enchantment! In a flash her scared wits seized at the 
 only endurable explanation. Enchantment! Of course! 
 Of course ! Oh, blessedly of course ! "What was she think- 
 ing of so soon to forget Christian, and her Shepherds f . . . 
 
 Beware that ye steppe. . . . How they had rubbed it 
 in too! And she hadn't come to a single danger yet ex- 
 cept motor-cars and the cow with the leering eye ; did she 
 suppose she was to win through without a qualm ? Foolish 
 Laura, to forget that between Delectable Mountains and the 
 Gates of the City lies, with all its bewilderments, the En- 
 chanted Ground. 
 
 The Enchanted Ground! Her eyes sought the far hills, 
 and once more credulity was fortified into conviction, for 
 even as she watched, the white autumn dusk uprose noise- 
 lessly, and before it city and hills alike shrank and were 
 gone. It was as convincing a piece of magic as could be 
 wanted. 
 
 Laura only wished Aunt Adela could have been there 
 to see it Aunt Adela, who did not believe in witches 
 Aunt Adela, always sniffing at Grimm's Fairy Tales/ Be- 
 sides, even Aunt Adela would be only for a moment 
 some sort of a companion, flesh and blood at least, at a 
 small girl's elbow, as she stands lonesomely on a strange 
 hill-top, buttoning the reefer that had seemed so hot and 
 thick down in the valley, pulling down cuffs of sleeves 
 through which the wind is tunnelling, making shivering 
 preparation for the plunge down down down into En- 
 chanted Ground.
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 41 
 
 Impossible to turn back now wasn't it? ... What a 
 notion? . . . Mother would be waiting. . . . Mother would 
 know by now that she was coing. . . . One of the Shining 
 Ones would be sure to have told her. . . . How excited 
 Mother would be growing. . . . The Enchanted Ground 
 stretched from sky to sky. ... It was beginning to rain, 
 and the wind cut through one's reefer as if it were gauze. 
 . . . But there was Mother. . . . She could get through 
 somehow. . . . Only she must hurry, for it must be nearly 
 tea-time. . . . She simply had to get to heaven by tea- 
 time. . . . 
 
 She shifted her autumn bunch, tucked her free hand 
 between frock and skin to keep it as warm as might be, 
 and, screwing up eyes and mouth against the drizzle that 
 whipped her face, set off at a stumbling trot down her 
 second hill-side in an afternoon.
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 Now the same gust of rain that was disputing with Laura 
 every inch of her downward path, buffeting her face, twist- 
 ing invisible hands in her hair, and sopping her shoes till 
 she slipped and slithered down the clay-lined runnels of the 
 road, had already more glorious insults to its credit ; for it 
 had bespattered unconcernedly, as it soughed past him, the 
 comfortable person as well as the immaculate bicycle of 
 Mr. H. J. Cloud. Henry Justin, no less, who, on this par- 
 ticular October Saturday at half-past four of what should 
 have been a fine afternoon, was a week short of his six- 
 teenth birthday; discreetly placed alike in his form and 
 his house, near enough to the heights to satisfy Mrs. Cloud 
 and his own dignity, yet not near enough to cause him any 
 responsible discomfort; pleased as usual with himself, and 
 more or less tolerant of his world ; cycling home from school, 
 to spend the Sunday with his mother. 
 
 But the hoyden rain, abetted by her partner the wind, 
 had driven dripping fingers between the collar of Henry 
 Justin and the tanned neck of Henry Justin, with no 
 more emotion than if it had been the neck and collar of 
 the shivering insignificance in the reefer coat a mile or 
 so away up the road: had trailed damply over him and 
 across him, dulling his nickel work and tipping his hat 
 over his eyes, and shrilling on ahead again without even 
 paying him the compliment of waiting for his opinion of 
 her. It was brief. He jumped off his bicycle and, with 
 a thrust-out underlip and a glance at the threatening sky, 
 gave the exclamation which stood with him for acquies- 
 cence, dissent, interest, indecision, or (as in this in- 
 stance) annoyance, the economical exclamation that Laura, 
 in a goaded moment, will refer to as a grunt. But she 
 
 42
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 43 
 
 will withdraw the expression unreservedly as soon as her 
 better self once more supervenes. Which is typical of 
 Laura, of the rebel temper and the Quaker conscience. 
 
 But that is to come. 
 
 We should be talking of Justin, a hundred yards ahead 
 of us, opening a gate into a field of stubble, disposing 
 himself comfortably beneath a convenient haystack till 
 the rain should be over. To do him justice, Justin would 
 have walked through it contentedly enough, rather en- 
 joying the sluicing downpour, certainly without a thought 
 of his clothes, which were as he liked them, old and shape- 
 less and comfortable; but he would not ride. He was 
 as near an old maid about his possessions as a healthy 
 boy can be, and the idea of exposing his fine new bicycle 
 simply did not occur to him. He had lifted it like a baby 
 across the stones and stubble, and had the absorbed face 
 that his mother loved as he polished its bespattered handle- 
 bars with his handkerchief, picked a straw from its chain, 
 and, propping it in the lee of the wind, covered it with his 
 coat, as a premature prince might cover a sleeping beauty 
 with still a week of her hundred years to run. Thereon, 
 climbing to the low shelf above it, he raked together a pil- 
 low of hay, settled himself against it with another grunt 
 contentment this time, for the hay was soft and scented 
 and the corner screened alike from wind and rain and 
 drew a small book and a large apple from his pocket. 
 Justin never neglected either of his inner men. The apple 
 was a pippin, and the book 's author a discovery of Justin 's. 
 He recommended him to every one. I think his name was 
 Carlyle. 
 
 He had been reading for half an hour, more and more 
 slowly, for the haystack-drowse that is not the least of the 
 spells of the Witch of Kent was creeping over him, when 
 his ear was caught by a rustle that might have been a 
 mouse in the wall of the stack, or a sparrow stealing straw, 
 or the leaves of his own book it had slipped from his 
 fingers fluttered by the air. He opened his eyes, idly
 
 44 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 surprised to find that they had been closed, but, seeing 
 nothing but rain-laced sky and sodden field, made no objec- 
 tion to their shutting out that blank prospect again, when 
 the rustle recommenced, punctuated with jumping sounds 
 as of a small dog scrambling on to a forbidden sofa, and 
 finally by a voice, as small and soft and breathless a voice 
 as he had ever heard. 
 
 "If you please," said the voice, "of, if you please 
 could you tell me the way to the Crystal Palace ? ' ' 
 
 Justin sat up and stared. Facing him, on the edge of 
 the shelf of hay, hooked to it insecurely by fingers and 
 little digging chin, hung a small peaked countenance, 
 wreathed in drenched elf-locks, with eyes like black dia- 
 monds set in rain-washed, wind-whipped cheeks. 
 
 Justin was too well-fed to be imaginative. And the 
 creature after all had spoken, had asked him something 
 in good enough English: on its bewildering head it wore 
 the most ordinary child's sailor cap with a gilt lettering on 
 the ribbon H.M.S. Indomitable; yet, for a ridiculous 
 instant, its fugitive, bodiless air beguiled him, and he 
 could have believed himself agape before a changeling, a 
 come-by-chance of wind and rain, a fairy nothing, gone 
 with the sky's first dispelling streak of blue. 
 
 ' ' If you please, ' ' the creature began again anxiously, and 
 stopped. There was a sound of yielding hay, and before 
 Justin could stretch out a hand it had disappeared with 
 some suddenness. There was a scuffle and a bump, and 
 Justin thought he heard a whimper. He rolled lazily to 
 the edge of the shelf and looked over. The child he could 
 see now that it was a little girl was standing below him 
 in the crushed stubble, brushing mournfully with a hand- 
 ful of the treacherous hay at the mud that plastered its 
 wisp of skirt. It had the gallantest air of assuring itself 
 that nothing on earth should induce it to cry; though its 
 eyes, as it lifted them to Justin again, had that shimmering 
 brilliance that only unshed tears can give. But it re- 
 turned to the charge.
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 45 
 
 "If you please " Then, with a sudden alluring 
 
 solicitude, "It's only me. I'm not a tramp. Oh, I hope 
 I didn't frighten you?" 
 
 "Well it was a bit of a shock." Justin looked amused. 
 ' ' I may get over it. ' ' 
 
 "I'm so sorry. It's fearful meeting tramps, isn't it?" 
 She had all the Kent child's horror of its bogey in her 
 voice. "That's why I was frightened, too. I thought you 
 were one, at first " 
 
 Justin murmured his gratification. 
 
 She amended anxiously. 
 
 "Oh, only from far off. But even if you were, I had to 
 ask the way. And when I saw the bicycle I knew you 
 couldn't be. It's a lovely bicycle." She regarded it with 
 wistful admiration and, insensibly, Justin thawed, like 
 any other male child between eight and eighty, to the 
 feminine intelligence that appreciated his hobby. 
 
 "It's not bad," he admitted, stretching out a long arm 
 to twitch modestly at the bicycle's covering, much as a 
 woman straightens the hat that a man 's glance has told her 
 is becoming. "Humber, you know." 
 
 She nodded eagerly. 
 
 "They're the best, aren't they? Mother's is a Swift. 
 She's going to have a Humber, though, when she comes 
 back. She's going to teach me to ride, then. She prom- 
 ised. I began, you know, before she went away. I could 
 jump off splendidly as long as there was grass to fall on, 
 but I couldn't jump on. But Aunt Adela won't let me 
 
 practise at all now. I wonder " her face lit up, "Oh 
 
 do you suppose there are bicycles at the Crystal Palace ? ' ' 
 
 He looked down at her amusedly. 
 
 "Why, of course. There's a track. Kaces. Awful 
 sport. You ought to get your mother to take you one day, 
 if you're so keen." 
 
 "Oh, she will," Laura assured him happily. "She al- 
 ways does what I want. I'll get her to, directly after tea. 
 Unless " she glanced up at the heavy sky. "Oh, I
 
 46 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 oughtn 't to be talking. I must get on. I shall be so dread- 
 fully late. If you'll just tell me which road to take- 
 She paused. "I suppose is it specially your haystack?" 
 she hinted delicately. 
 
 "Why?" 
 
 "Because, if you didn't mind if you'd help me up 
 it's so high " 
 
 Justin leant over good-naturedly and held out his hands 
 to her. She caught at them and was swung up with a crow 
 of delight. 
 
 "You're stronger than Mother!" 
 
 He threw her gently from him on to the hay. 
 
 "Here, don't splash me all over. You're as wet as the 
 Thames." For her dripping hair had whipped across his 
 face. 
 
 ' ' Horrid, sergy wet ! ' ' She sniffed at herself in delicate 
 disgust. 
 
 "Well, and now you're up, what do you want to do?" 
 
 ' ' There 's a cross-roads further on. I saw it from Beech 
 Hill." She tiptoed. "Yes, there! I couldn't see from 
 the road. D'you see? Through that tree level with the 
 nest. Which of them ought I to take?" 
 
 "Where to?" 
 
 "Why I told you the Calestial City." 
 
 "The C celestial that 's in the Pilgrim's Progress! Is 
 it a game?" 
 
 "A game!" She was disappointed at such futility in 
 the big, pleasant-faced boy she was beginning to like. ' ' As 
 
 if " Then she broke off, enlightened. "Oh, I see 
 
 you call it the Crystal Palace, too. So does Nurse. Shall 
 I get there by tea-time, do you think?" 
 
 "To the Crystal Palace? You! My good kid! Some 
 one's been pulling your leg. It's miles to the Crystal 
 Palace." 
 
 "Oh, no," she assured him. "It's only the enchant- 
 ment that makes it look far. It's close it's quite close,
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 47 
 
 really. I saw it myself from Beech Hill as bright as 
 bright " 
 
 "Beech Hill! He regarded the diminutive athlete in- 
 credulously. "You walked from Beech Hill today? By 
 yourself? Rot!" 
 
 "Oh, yes!" But he could see that his surprise or some 
 thought of her own disquieted her. She jerked herself to 
 her knees from the comfort of the hay. "I think I'll be 
 getting on now," she said, with transparent politeness and 
 a sidelong glance at him. 
 
 Now Justin was placidly accustomed to take things as 
 they came rain, haystacks, or nixies interested in Humber 
 bicycles. But as he examined her more closely, it was 
 apparent even to his indifference that, for all her dishevel- 
 ment, there must somewhere be a nursemaid in search of 
 this particular nixie. Her shyness, rounded by courtesy, 
 was not the mere coltishness of the village child. A vague 
 sense of responsibility mingled in his mind with a good 
 deal of amusement. 
 
 "Hi! Stop a minute!" he called. "You! H.M.S. 
 Indomitable!" 
 
 "My name," she flashed at him, "is Laura." 
 
 ' ' And mine, ' ' he countered, with a twinkle, ' ' is Justin. ' ' 
 
 She gave him a wicked child's grin. 
 
 "Good-bye, Mr. Justin " and whipped her legs over 
 
 the side of the stack. 
 
 But Justin could be quick when he chose. His long 
 arm shot out and caught her by her loose child 's belt. She 
 wriggled in his grip like a snared rabbit. 
 
 "Steady! You'd have walloped right into my bicycle 
 if you'd jumped then," he reproached her. 
 
 "It wasn't that! You didn't stop me for that! You 
 guessed! I saw you guess!" She faced him quivering, 
 defiant. 
 
 "Oh, you are running away then," he chuckled. 
 "Thought so!"
 
 48 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 She turned on him like a leaping flame. 
 
 "You're going to stop me? Oh, and I thought you 
 were nice. Oh, you're not going to tell? You couldn't 
 be such a sneak ! ' ' 
 
 He flushed a little in spite of his sixteen dignified 
 years. She was quick to see it. Her tone altered. She 
 appeased him hurriedly. 
 
 "Oh, but truly it's all right. I promise you. Aunt 
 Adela will be angry, of course, like Mrs. Christian but 
 Mother won't mind. Mother lives there, you see. I'm 
 almost certain she's expecting me. They're bound to have 
 opera glasses there, like the Shepherds " 
 
 "The Shepherds?" 
 
 "Oh, you kpnow!" She stamped a muddy foot im- 
 patiently. "They lent them to Christian and Hopeful to 
 see the City through from the Hill called Clear. But one 
 can see better still from Beech Hill. I almost saw Mother. 
 She's sure to be watching for me over the walls. And 
 I'm so late. I'm so late. Oh, do tell me the way and let 
 me get on. If you hadn't seen your mother for months 
 and months and months " Her mouth trembled. 
 
 ' ' All right ! All right ! Keep your hair on ! Nobody 's 
 going to stop you." He was surprised to find himself so 
 concerned with her concern. ' ' But you can 't go anywhere 
 in this rain," he told her. "You'd be drowned. You're 
 half drowned already. It's getting worse and worse. 
 You wait till it's over and I'll see if I can't give you a 
 lift on my step. ' ' 
 
 "Oh, would you?" Her eyes adored him. "Oh, could 
 you? Shouldn't I be too heavy?" 
 
 "But you'd never get to the Palace tonight, you know," 
 he warned her. " It 's five miles to the next station. ' ' 
 
 "Oh, I mustn't go by train. It wouldn't be safe. They 
 all walk in the Pilgrim's Progress. Indeed, I don't know 
 whether it's safe to sit here so long. The hay's making me 
 awfully sleepy. You know what the Shepherds said, 
 Beware that ye sleep not and beware Oh!" She
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 49 
 
 pulled herself suddenly to her knees, examining him with 
 eyes of suspicion. 
 
 ''What's up?" he demanded. 
 
 "It's all right. Your face isn't black." She sank back 
 relieved from the inspection. "I only wondered for a 
 dreadful minute if you were the Flatterer." She smiled 
 at him. "One has to be so careful," she apologized, "on 
 Enchanted Ground." 
 
 He pulled at his ear. 
 
 ' ' You seem to be up in Bunyan. I don 't understand this 
 game. Look here why don't you squat down and tell me 
 all about it ? I won 't give you away. ' ' 
 
 "Won't you?" She eyed him wistfully. Her eyes, like 
 any dog's, said, "Can I trust you?" and his, though he 
 did not know it, told her that she might. With that long 
 look she probed and accepted him, never, I think, through 
 all their tangled future to doubt him again. Exasperation 
 she might feel, and weariness, and once a very exaltation 
 of contempt ; but never doubt never any doubt at all that 
 within the limitations of his nature, he was honest and 
 kind. 
 
 And, with belief in him, the film of secretiveness that 
 had formed over her mind, that was not natural to her, 
 that was but a consequence of her situation, was wiped 
 away like mist from a window-pane. She did not realize 
 that she had been longing for a confidant, but she did curl 
 herself, without more ado, as close as she could wriggle to 
 this likeable fellow-creature, and began to talk to him at 
 a rate that would have astonished Aunt Adela. But then 
 Justin did not interrupt her account of her own pilgrim's 
 progress to tell her that her stockings were muddy. And 
 so he heard, sleepily, with his eyes on the steady slant 
 of the rain, and most of his thoughts far enough away 
 from Laura, all about Mother, and the twins, and Gran'- 
 papa, and the City of Gold, and what Nurse's mother had 
 said, and what Laura would do when she got there a 
 long, long tale, that reached him in some shape as the
 
 50 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 Mouse's tale reached Alice. He was left with a vague 
 notion that Laura was a rum little kid, also that the 
 mother must be rather a charming person. He supposed, 
 when the rain stopped, he should have to see the child 
 back to her home. . . . Yet it was a bit of a shame to get 
 her into trouble. . . . Queer, that she shouldn't be living 
 with her mother. . . . He wondered what was behind it 
 all. . . . And what was the mother doing at the Palace? 
 . . . He thought that only the attendants had quarters 
 there. . . . 
 
 He roused himself. 
 
 ''Your mother lives at the Crystal Palace, did you say?" 
 He propped himself on his elbows, nibbling a straw and 
 frowning meditatively at Laura, who sat, hugging her 
 knees, hunched like a witch against the wall of the stack. 
 "Oh, no! She's only staying there till she gets well." 
 
 "Then where do you live?" 
 
 "Oh, I live with Mother. But I'm staying with Gran'- 
 papa. ' ' 
 
 "Yes, but where?" 
 
 "I told you," she reminded him reproachfully, "at 
 Brackenhurst. Behind Beech Hill." 
 
 "Brackenhurst! I didn't know you said Brackenhurst. 
 Why, I live at Brackenhurst," he informed her. 
 
 "Oh! Then I'll see you again." There was most flat- 
 tering satisfaction in her voice. 
 
 He continued, unheeding 
 
 "Funny I haven't run across you before now. Of course 
 you only came in May. And we were at the Lakes all 
 the hols. What did you say was your grandfather's 
 name?" 
 
 "Gran 'papa. Gran 'papa Valentine." 
 
 "Not old Valentine of Green Gates? Oh, then you're 
 one of the new grandchildren ! Of course. Oh, I know all 
 
 about you now. But I thought didn 't some one say ? ' ' 
 
 Before he realized that he must check himself he had 
 blurted out his perplexity. "But I thought your mother
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 51 
 
 was dead." Then, horrified at himself "that is I mean 
 
 to say of course it can't be the same " and so stopped 
 
 helplessly. 
 
 She made no reply: gave no sign at all that she had 
 even heard him : only leant motionless against the wall of 
 hay as if some heavy, invisible blow had pinned her there. 
 And he, pitying her, swearing at himself for his inadver- 
 tence, sat uncomfortably through the silence that had fallen 
 upon them, fidgeting with his pockets, wishing that he 
 could think of something to say to her. 
 
 He began at last, tentatively, ingratiatingly 
 
 "I say, Laura ! I say 
 
 She lifted her head and looked at him, searchingly, as 
 one looks at the last link in a chain, in a chain of cir- 
 cumstantial evidence that began far away with medicine 
 and little white shawls ; with black sashes and a whispering 
 nurse, and the visit to Gran 'papa Valentine. She fingered 
 those links, one by one, recognizing, testing them, and so 
 arrived at last at the big, worried boy sitting by her in the 
 hay. 
 
 "Mother is dead," she said to him, in a voice that was 
 entirely unemotional. She was confirming his statement, 
 not questioning it. 
 
 "Oh, you know perhaps I daresay I muddled names 
 made a mistake," he suggested, because he could 
 not help it. And knew well enough that he had made 
 none. 
 
 "Buried?" 
 
 "Oh, well surely you must understand " He was 
 
 distressed. He did not know how to phrase his answers. 
 
 "There was poor Ben " Her voice quivered. He 
 
 could not know that she was re-living a memory, stumbling 
 once more, as she played in the long grass behind the 
 chicken-run, upon her little old dog who had been missing 
 for two long days. She remembered her delight, and then 
 her sudden terror, and the gardener, coming with his big 
 spade. Mother had been within call. Mother had allayed
 
 52 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 that grief. Yet Laura had never quite forgotten the poor 
 stiffened body and the tiny swarming ants. 
 
 And now Mother. . . . 
 
 She was taken with a fit of shuddering. The dry-eyed 
 sobs that a child should not know shook her pitilessly. 
 
 Justin, wishing desperately that he had his own infalli- 
 ble mother at hand to whom to surrender a situation that 
 was beyond him, did his kindly best. 
 
 "It's all right, you know," he found himself assuring 
 her earnestly. "It's really all right. I know I know 
 it's most beastly luck. But it's all right " 
 
 He broke off. He might have been the monotonous rain 
 for all the notice she took of him. 
 
 He began afresh 
 
 "Laura,'' then, with an effort, "dear old thing I say, 
 you know, you must pull yourself together." He put his 
 hand on her arm, drawing away her fingers from her face. 
 
 She yielded indifferently, letting him do as he pleased. 
 
 He had an inspiration. 
 
 "It's all right, you know, about the C celestial City. She 
 is there, and you'll get there some day, don't you worry 
 only it isn't the Crystal Palace. You'll have to wait. 
 But you '11 get there some day. ' ' 
 
 She lifted heavy eyes. 
 'When?" 
 
 'Oh I don't know. When you're old." 
 'As old as you?" 
 
 'Oh, older than that seventy or eighty." 
 'Years?" 
 
 He nodded. 
 
 "It's seventy days to Christmas. That's not even one 
 year." Her voice trailed into hopelessness. 
 
 But at least she had spoken. Justin was pleased with 
 his resourcefulness. He tried again. 
 
 "You know, when you're grown up the days go quicker. 
 Oh, yes they simply whiz. Honest ! You 11 see. ' '
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 63 
 
 "Shall I?" She edged a little nearer to him. 
 
 "Why, each time you go to bed you're a day nearer." 
 He pulled out his watch. "Talking of bed do you know 
 it 's half-past five ? What 's your bed-time ? ' ' 
 
 "I don't know." She leaned against him with the 
 prompt abandoment of a child discovering its own fatigue. 
 
 "Not far off, anyway! I've got to get you home, young 
 woman." 
 
 "Aunt Adela will be angry." But her tone was merely 
 speculative. Laura was stone to Aunt Adela 's worst pun- 
 ishments now. 
 
 Justin considered. The steadiness of the rain, long over- 
 due, was prophetic. No chance of its lifting this week- 
 end. No escape, for all his wasted hour, for Justin's 
 bicycle. Justin's bicycle must submit to a soaking, with 
 Justin and Laura on its back. It had, going by the road 
 that avoided Laura's hill-tops, a seven-mile run before it, 
 to reach even Justin's end of Brackenhurst. Justin, as he 
 slipped off the damp haystack and resumed his sopping 
 coat, thought that he and his bicycle would have done 
 their duty and something over if they escorted Laura thus 
 far. She could be sent on to Green Gates in the pony- 
 trap, if his mother did not insist, as he shrewdly suspected 
 she would when she heard the whole story, on keeping 
 the child over-night, to be coddled against colds and heart- 
 ache. 
 
 He was not wrong. Mrs. Cloud, once satisfied that no 
 bones had been broken and that he would take a hot bath 
 and drink a hot posset as soon as they could be prepared, 
 was ready enough to follow him to the hall where Laura, 
 numbed with cold and wet and the long ride on Justin's 
 cross-bar, sat in a heap where he had left her, like a small 
 trapped animal: and after a glance, Mrs. Cloud, all soft 
 hair and soft eyes and soft voice, had forgotten even Justin. 
 A groom had been despatched to Green Gates indeed; but 
 Laura, warmed and bathed and fed, was settled for the
 
 54 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 night in a fire-lit room, in the bed that Justin had out- 
 grown, and that his mother had not brought herself to give 
 away. 
 
 Mrs. Cloud, as the dinner-bell rang, had a motherly 
 good-night, with tuckings-up and the tenderest of kisses 
 for Laura. But Laura lay passive, unresponsive, on the 
 pillow that was scarcely whiter than her face, staring up at 
 Mrs. Cloud with wide, dark eyes. 
 
 ' ' What is it, Laura ? ' ' Mrs. Cloud smiled down at her. 
 
 She murmured something beneath her breath, as a scared 
 child will. 
 
 "What is it? Do you want anything?" Mrs. Cloud 
 bent down, her face close to the unwinking eyes. 
 
 "I want " In a whisper Laura made known her 
 
 need. "I want the big boy." 
 
 Mrs. Cloud shook her head. 
 
 "Not now. You must go to sleep now. You shall see 
 Justin tomorrow." 
 
 I wan t " 
 
 "Justin's having his dinner. He's so hungry so tired 
 from his long ride. He had to carry you, too, you know. 
 You don't want to call poor Justin upstairs in the middle 
 of his dinner, do you?" 
 
 "No. Oh, no." Then, with concern "Poor, tired 
 Justin!" 
 
 She lay quiet. 
 
 But when Justin, on his way to his own night's rest, put 
 his head round the door to see, on Mrs. Cloud's behalf, 
 "if that child was all right," he found her lying as his 
 mother had left her, still with those wide, unwinking eyes 
 of a watchful dog fixed upon the door. 
 
 "Hullo, old thing! Awake still? Want to say good- 
 night?" 
 
 She nodded dumbly. 
 
 He crossed the room, and stood looking down at her. 
 
 "Comfortable?"
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 55 
 
 She nodded again. 
 
 "Sleepy?" 
 
 She shook her head. 
 
 "Oh, nonsense, you must go to sleep. Look here you 
 be a good girl and go to sleep and tomorrow I'll give you 
 a lesson on Mother's old bicycle. Like that?" 
 
 She said nothing. He fidgeted. He was at the end of 
 his consolations. 
 
 "Well good-night now." He turned to go. 
 
 Her hand shot out and caught his arm. 
 
 "Is it quite true?" 
 
 "What?" 
 
 "About Mother?" 
 
 " 'Fraid so." He moved uneasily, afraid, boylike, of 
 her tears. But she did not cry. 
 
 "Are you sure? Are you sure?" 
 
 He nodded. 
 
 She turned from him with a sharp movement, so that 
 he could see no more than the outline of her cheek. 
 
 He stood beside her patiently for a time, but she did 
 not move, and he wondered at last if drowsiness were 
 doing for her all that he could not. With slow precaution 
 he began to edge away his arm. Instantly her grasp tight- 
 ened. 
 
 "Oh, I say you must go to sleep, you know," he ad- 
 monished her. 
 
 She turned again, lifting herself on her pillow. Her 
 eyes devoured his face. 
 
 "Will you really teach me tomorrow?" 
 
 "Of course I will. I'll give you lessons. We'll soon 
 have you riding all over the place." 
 
 "But you're going away." 
 
 ' ' I come home every week. ' ' 
 
 "Do you?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Honest?"
 
 56 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 "Honest. Good-night, old thing." He hesitated. 
 Then, his pity for her conquering his school-boy code, he 
 bent down and pecked awkwardly at her cheek. 
 
 Instantly he was drawn close, was half choked by little 
 passionate, clinging arms. 
 
 "I'll love you. Oh, I'll love you!" cried Laura desper- 
 ately.
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 Do you remember Topaz? Do you remember that ball of 
 pride and red fur with the inscrutable eyes and erect tail 
 and no heart at all as far as I was concerned? 
 
 Do you remember her slow, insolent porte, her airs of 
 caste? How she lapped milk, delicately, dubiously, to 
 oblige you, not herself? How she would sit in the fireside 
 circle o' nights, her paws doubled under her, discreet, un- 
 obtrusive, yet so obviously a visitor, that she made 
 Father, who is a family man, feel uncomfortable? How 
 she would edge in graceful reproof from the uninvited, 
 stroking hand ? With what silent savagery she fought you 
 if you took her on your knee ? 
 
 No cat to whom I have belonged has ever treated me as 
 Topaz did ; at best with resignation as having a nice taste 
 in eiderdowns on a rainy night; at worst ignoring me as 
 subtly as she ignored the fluttered but inaccessible canary. 
 Yet I did my best for her, always brushed her, never 
 washed her, obeyed barefooted, in the chillest hours, her 
 peremptory mew. Not that she was consciously ungrate- 
 ful. I think she knew that I meant well. But she never 
 permitted me for an instant to imagine that I understood 
 her I, who flatter myself that I appreciate poor pussy 
 more than most ! 
 
 And then the house next door was taken at last, by a 
 ramshackle, elastic family with a studio, who hung out 
 their washing in the front garden as well as the back. 
 We did not call upon them. But Topaz did. Call? She 
 adopted them! 
 
 She, who would not be handled, patted even, I have 
 seen, Her claws full of bark, hauled from a tree by her 
 
 67
 
 58 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 tail and carried limply, head downwards, under the arm 
 of the youngest son; or rolling on her back in the gravel, 
 ecstatically appreciative of Mrs. Next Door's thimble under 
 her ear. She sat about on their shoulders, their laps, 
 wherever she could get : caught their mice, drank their skim 
 milk, allowed them to wash her in one bath with the 
 terrier pup. Why? Heaven knows! She liked them. 
 They were her sort. Yet I am sure we were a much nicer 
 family than the people next door. 
 
 She never quite forgot us : was even, as if in apology, a 
 shade more friendly than before. For a long time, in- 
 deed, she paid a daily call of courtesy, sitting a dignified 
 half-hour on what had been her chair, before retiring 
 again to her spiritual home; but one always felt that she 
 did it as a matter of duty. And when the Next Doors 
 moved on, her visits ceased. We missed her, just a little, 
 and made half-hearted inquiries, but there it ended. The 
 Next Doors must have taken her with them. At any rate 
 we never set eyes on Topaz again. 
 
 All this I tell you because I am sure that what I feel 
 about Topaz is what Aunt Adela felt about Laura and the 
 Clouds. Laura, you see, adopted the Clouds. From the 
 day when Justin carried her home to his mother, to the 
 end at least of this story, she was theirs, body and soul, 
 clinging to them, shyly, unobtrusively, yet with the deli- 
 cate tenacity of a white rose-bush adopting a south wall. 
 
 Aunt Adela did not, could not, object. Aunt Adela, who 
 lived wholeheartedly for her neighbours and their more 
 intimate affairs, Aunt Adela, who liked to be asked to 
 tete-a-tete tea, or to meet her hostess's dearest friends, had 
 never overcome a certain aloofness that distinguished Mrs. 
 Cloud and made her a desirable acquaintance. Aunt 
 Adela 's snobbery was harmless enough. To do her justice, 
 money meant nothing to her, poor as she was ; but she had 
 her weakness for what she called "the best people." And 
 Mrs. Cloud, with her gentle interest in your affairs, and 
 her placid and implacable reserve about her own, Mrs.
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 59 
 
 Cloud, with her son at college and her husband on the 
 church wall, and a bishop burgeoning in the family tree, 
 Mrs. Cloud belonged, Aunt Adela felt in her bones, to the 
 very best people. 
 
 Aunt Adela, then, was flattered at Mrs. Cloud's ap- 
 proval of Aunt Adela 's niece, put no difficulties in Laura's 
 way, and, after a time, grew tired of questioning her as to 
 how she got on with Mrs. Cloud, how she employed the 
 regularly lengthening hours she spent at the Priory. Yet, 
 under her acquiescence, and without any special affection 
 for Laura, she resented Laura's stubborn preference for 
 Mrs. Cloud in exactly the fashion that I resented the de- 
 fection of Topaz. Why couldn't Laura be contented at 
 home? After all, they must be a nicer family than the 
 Clouds even than the Clouds! 
 
 Gran 'papa, by the way, made no comment at all, shared 
 neither Aunt Adela 's voluble approval ''and Mrs. Cloud 
 has such an Influence ' ' nor her secret acerbity. Possibly 
 he was uninterested possibly he was not left out in the 
 cold. Laura knew her way to Gran 'papa's room. And 
 Gran 'papa, between his care of his grand-daughter 's gram- 
 mar and his correction of her pronunciation and enunci- 
 ation he was never satisfied with either may yet have 
 had time to be thrilled by the news that Mrs. Cloud had 
 sent Justin a hamper, that Laura had helped her to pack 
 it and had dug up her own radish from her own garden 
 to put in, because Mrs. Cloud had said that Justin simply 
 loved liked, Gran 'papa Justin simply liked radishes! 
 and had Gran 'papa read The Tiger of Mysore Henty? 
 It was Justin's book, only one of the covers was gone, and 
 Mrs. Cloud had said that Justin had said she might have 
 it. She would lend it to Gran 'papa if he liked. A per- 
 fectly ripping a most extremely interesting book. 
 
 Now why should not Laura have imparted these and 
 kindred matters to Aunt Adela questioning, quiveringly 
 interested Aunt Adela ? "When Papa was so unsympathetic 
 with children. . . . The twins, for instance. . . . The twins
 
 60 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 had no link with him at all beyond the weekly threepen- 
 nies . . . Aunt Adela could not make it out. Or, for that 
 matter, what dear Mrs. Cloud saw in Laura. . . . 
 
 Little enough, I should think, at first, save Justin's 
 vouchsafed interest. Justin, who was so absorbed by 
 things that he seldom had time for people, had not for- 
 gotten Laura, had actually inquired after the child, twice, 
 in letters, had carried her off, dumb with delight, on his 
 next Sunday at home, to spend the afternoon in his den. 
 Justin had talked: Mrs. Cloud had heard the rumble of 
 his deep voice all the afternoon. Mrs. Cloud had a smile 
 and a thanksgiving for her good son, tender as a girl to 
 acknowledged pain or need. 
 
 Yet, to me, it seems nevertheless certain that Laura had, 
 from the first, the trick of keeping him amused. From the 
 first, too, she must have had her shepherding way with him 
 and his belongings ; for Mrs. Cloud, announcing tea, hardly 
 recognized Justin's den Justin's housemaid-proof den. 
 Laura would appear to have tidied it. At any rate, how- 
 ever they had passed their afternoon, they came down to 
 dripping cake and muffins at last, hungry and very well 
 pleased with each other. 
 
 Justin told his mother that Laura was a ripping little 
 kid. 
 
 What Laura told the Memory who still came to her in 
 the night-time, who knows? Yet that that yearning 
 shadow was eased, appeased, by what it heard, I do be- 
 lieve; because, as the months sped, its anxious visits les- 
 sened and grew rare, until, at last, it came no more to a 
 Laura grown happy again. 
 
 Justin, of course, was seldom at home, but you can see, 
 with his open and unusual approval working upon Mrs. 
 Cloud's already aroused motherliness, how swift and steady 
 would be her notice of Laura. It was in her nature to be 
 kind, pitiful, easy. Her cheerful heart was like her cheer- 
 ful house, with window-wide rooms, white and golden and 
 domestic, filled with sunshine and flowers, with firelight
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 61 
 
 and singing birds and kittens that never grew up. She had 
 room in both for a child's voice and a child's ways, the 
 more, perhaps, since the reserve her son shared would not, 
 though she were lonely with Justin away, let her say 
 easily to a stranger, "Come in be at home!" But a 
 child she could welcome. 
 
 Laura, on her side, had no hesitations whatever. Driven 
 by the needs of her nature, shy Laura, timid, tentative 
 Laura, could, like any starved sparrow, be insistent upon 
 Mrs. Cloud's threshold, cheeping hopefully till she was ac- 
 corded entry-right, her crumbs, and a corner in the warm. 
 Once in, once accepted, she was quiet. Too quiet . . . 
 thought Mrs. Cloud, yet a good little soul. . . . She was 
 dazed, I dare say, in those first months, by her better for- 
 tune : was still eyeing life with meek vigilance, as a dog eyes 
 you when you have stumbled on its paw. Also, though she 
 clung to Justin's mother, she had no special spontaneous 
 affection for Mrs. Cloud, as Mrs. Cloud who was ready 
 enough to pet her, soon realized. Grateful she was, but 
 elusive too, cold, evading kisses, unresponsive when you 
 took her on your knee, limply angular against a motherly 
 breast. It was not Mrs. Cloud who had picked her up 
 out of a haystack out of a hell. . . . 
 
 But, received discreetly as one representing a federate 
 state, allowed to hunch by the hour (but on an individual 
 footstool) at Mrs. Cloud's feet, hugging her own knees, 
 elaborating her own views of life and enquiring with lur- 
 ing, alluring interest into those of her hostess, Laura could 
 be singularly companionable in an elderly and impersonal 
 fashion that made Justin laugh and chaff them both when 
 he caught them at their gossiping, but which had the un- 
 doubted effect of making Mrs. Cloud confidential. 
 
 ' Confidential ' is a strange word to link with Mrs. Cloud, 
 who did not, originally because she would not (but 'would' 
 had long ago hardened into 'could') expand or respond 
 to any one save Justin : and how often, how intimately even 
 to him, had she spoken of what lay closest to her heart?
 
 62 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 closer, more desperately dear than Justin, even than 
 Justin; for women will always wonder how far the God- 
 appointed seed consoles for Abel dead and Cain a fugitive. 
 What should Justin know, beyond their names, of the two 
 little girls who died, and of the first-born, John, the 
 legendary brother, so like and so unlike himself, John Cloud 
 the ne'er-do-weel, swallowed up years since by the conti- 
 nent that gives new lamps for old ? 
 
 But watch Mrs. Cloud's face (or, if you love her a little, 
 do not watch) when Brackenhurst stirs its tea, and 
 doubles up its thin bread-and-butter, and talks, with its air 
 of bewildered but unshakable patronage, of America. 
 
 The grocer, bankrupt since Brackenhurst 's invasion by 
 the smart, blue-painted Co-operative Stores (margarine 
 given in with every pound of butter) poor Pringleson the 
 grocer is doing very well out there. Has built a house and 
 sent home for Mrs. Pringleson. 
 
 "Ah, well one knows how they want men!" says 
 Brackenhurst sagely. "Actually pay emigrants to come. 
 Or is that New Zealand? And that girl from the 
 'Plough'!" Brackenhurst coughs. "Yes, doing splen- 
 didly ! Ah, well, they want servants so out there, you see ! 
 An absolute famine! Put up with anything anything! 
 Extraordinary! No caps! Bicycles provided! Evenings 
 out! And wages! Incredible!" 
 
 Brackenhurst, with an eye on its own dragooned and 
 aproned treasure, hesitates between envy of a land that 
 can afford such wages and concede such privileges, and a 
 preference for its own England of modest incomes and at- 
 tendant uniforms. And volunteers news of a nephew's 
 friend who was in the rush of 'ninety-six, an eulogy of Ella 
 Wheeler Wilcox and a recipe for American rarebit, and so 
 to Mrs. Beeton and home waters again. 
 
 But we watch the two bright spots of colour fade again 
 in Mrs. Cloud's cheeks, and her hand relax that held so 
 tightly the arm of the chair, while with the other she lifts 
 her tea-cup and drinks, a little thirstily, and are glad
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 63 
 
 that Brackenhurst is less observant than you or I should 
 be, of its dear Mrs. Cloud. 
 
 And yet, incredible as it may seem, it was not long before 
 Laura knew all about John, and Lettiee, and little Mary- 
 Rosalind. The big fat family albums, with their stamped, 
 stuffed leathern covers and biblical clasps, were not to be 
 kept from Laura, reverent yet intrigued: and once fairly 
 open on Mrs. Cloud's lap at a litle girl in pantalettes and 
 an urchin that Laura at first glance had mistaken for 
 Justin, there would be stories. 
 
 Laura would ground-bait artfully. 
 
 "Was Justin ever naughty when he was little, Mrs. 
 Cloud?" 
 
 Mrs. Cloud would affect forgetfulness. 
 
 "Oh, not more than other children, I suppose. Aren't 
 your little brothers ever naughty?" 
 
 Laura would consider. 
 
 "Oh, yes. Silly naughty. But not exciting. Not like 
 Justin when he threw the porridge at Miss Beamish." 
 Her eyes gleamed admiration. "And that day, you know, 
 at the photographer's when he was so cross. The pic- 
 ture's here." 
 
 ' ' That was John, ' ' said Mrs. Cloud quickly. 
 
 ' ' Oh ? ? " Laura could put a good deal into her exclama- 
 tions. "Oh???" 
 
 The knitting needles would slacken for long minutes, 
 till at last, with a click and a gleam, caught from the fire or 
 from Mrs. Cloud's eyes, hands and voice would pick up 
 the thread. 
 
 "I'm afraid he was a bad boy, too. I remember " 
 
 Then Laura would give a sigh of achievement and settle 
 down to listen. 
 
 But besides the stories, the interminable stories that a 
 child loves, of other little boys and girls, there was endless 
 amusement in the grown-ups, the drooping ladies and Mr. 
 Mantalini gentlemen, the family groups with pig-tailed 
 children, the crinolines and the bustles, the whiskers and
 
 64 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 the ringlets, and the pork-pie hats of all the aunts and 
 uncles and cousins and grandfathers and great-grand- 
 mothers of Justin. It was very interesting: and she 
 learned to refer to them with an air of intimate recollection 
 that staggered Justin one day, when, sprawling by the fire 
 with a college friend and The Scarlet Pimpernel, he told a 
 story, quite a good story, of an emigre who had married a 
 great-aunt or other of his own. 
 
 A voice from the window-seat at once reproached him. 
 
 "Not your great-aunt, Justin, your mother's great-aunt, 
 and it was her great-aunt Jane Eleanor, not her great-aunt 
 Emily." 
 
 Justin jumped. 
 
 Laura as usual she was lying flat, her chin in her fists, 
 her heels in the air turned a page. She was no longer 
 concerned. She had done her duty, and the Arabian Nights 
 was more than absorbing. 
 
 "Oh, it was, was it?" said Justin. And then, recover- 
 ing, "Shut up, Laura. It's not your Aunt Emily!" 
 
 She lifted eyes clouded with her story. 
 
 "Eleanor not Emily," she corrected patiently. 
 "Great-aunt Emily married Great-uncle Michael, and it's 
 their little boy you were so like when you were little. All 
 except the nose." 
 
 The friend chuckled. 
 
 "Where did you get all this from?" demanded Justin, 
 overborne by the evidence. 
 
 "I don't know your mother told me," said Laura 
 vaguely. Then, without a change of tone "Justin, would 
 you have married Haiatalnefous, as well as the Princess of 
 China if you'd been Camaralzaman?" 
 
 "Certainly not," said Justin virtuously, and the friend 
 went off into a sudden fit of laughter. 
 
 "Because I don't think it was fair," said Laura with in- 
 tense conviction.
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 AT half -past ten years old, Laura went to school and then 
 came home again, with the simple directness of the King 
 of France. 
 
 It was her own fault, as she candidly admitted to herself 
 her own, Justin's a little, still more Mr. Kipling's, but 
 mainly and responsibly, her own. You observe that she 
 did not blame Aunt Adela at all. She was always a just 
 child. 
 
 And yet, of course, it was Aunt Adela who had been anx- 
 ious for at least a year that Laura should go to school, who 
 had said so, plaintively, once to Papa, who did not com- 
 mit himself, and incessantly to Brackenhurst ; for board- 
 ing schools had a Refining Influence . . . and Compan- 
 ionship, you know . . . and she had a bosom friend, a 
 Miss Massingberd, such an Intellectual woman, who had 
 recently opened a school and needed pupils. . . . 
 
 Upon the horns of that altar Aunt Adela intended that 
 Laura, entirely for her own good, should be offered up; 
 for Aunt Adela was indefatigably benevolent at second 
 hand. She used to make opportunity for little chats with 
 Laura, and paint flamboyant pictures of the delights that 
 awaited her if she would only tell Gran 'papa that she 
 should like to go to school. (Already the household was 
 finding Laura a convenient mediator.) Laura listened 
 politely, with her head on one side, like a wary robin. 
 But she, too, did not commit herself. 
 
 One unlucky morning, however, fate overtook her. 
 She was engaged at the time in the particularly fascinat- 
 ing occupation of tidying Mrs. Cloud's wardrobe drawers. 
 If I were Laura, I could write a poem on Mrs. Cloud's 
 wardrobe, big as a little house, brown and grained and 
 
 65
 
 66 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 polished like a horse-chestnut or a ha'penny bun, with its 
 clinking handles and the long looking-glass door, which, as 
 it swung open, reflected in the mantel-glass opposite your 
 own side face, unfamiliar, gratifying. It had dark shelves 
 that ran up like ladder-rungs to the ceiling but they 
 pulled out disconcertingly if you tried to climb and great 
 drawers in which you could easily have hidden Prince 
 Charlie (lying flat with blouses over him) what time the 
 Butcher and his Southrons clanked up the stairs. Oh, 
 the long shelves and the deep draws it had, all vaguely 
 sweet with orris-root and lemon-weed, and the piles of 
 smooth linen (Laura's night-dresses were flannel, a hy- 
 gienic brown) and the tiny scented bags that dropped from 
 them, tied up with rainbow ribbons ! And there were boxes 
 Japanese boxes each with its special smell of lace or 
 leather, and its name upon its lid in golden handwriting; 
 and a little wicker basket where the dead gloves went, that 
 Laura might take for finger-stalls or gardening; and 
 shawls for dressing-up, and a feather fan, and a scarf from 
 India all sewn over with silver and as heavy as a tennis 
 net, for playing mermaids. There was a piece-drawer like 
 Mrs. S. F. Robinson's enchanted bag; and a carved comb 
 six inches high and once, in a corner, candles and glass 
 balls from last year's Christmas tree; and little trinket 
 cases that Laura was allowed to open, and the great jewel 
 box with the baize petticoat that was always locked because 
 it had diamonds inside it, and Justin's watch, and more 
 rings than would go on all Laura's fingers, counting 
 thumbs. 
 
 The sea hath its pearls, and argosies unload in London 
 Town; but have you ever tidied Mrs. Cloud's wardrobe? 
 
 Tidying (she called it tidying!) this delectable wardrobe 
 that day, what should Laura come upon but a fat bundle 
 which, deposited with the dumb eloquence of a retriever on 
 Mrs. Cloud's lap, was deprived of its elastic band and dis- 
 played to her as a sheaf of reports Justin 's reports at his 
 preparatory school. She was allowed to go through them,
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 67 
 
 and because she could not help wheedling explanations out 
 of a particularly busy Mrs. Cloud, to read to herself a few, 
 a very few, of Justin's letters home. Here was literature 
 indeed ! There was Shakespeare, not doubt : there was the 
 B. O. P. There was Louisa Alcott and Sir Thomas Malory ; 
 but what were such scribblers then to Laura reading 
 Justin's letters home? 
 
 To top that revelation came Stalky and Co. for a birth- 
 day present. 
 
 Naturally she dreamed of going to school herself. In 
 that mood Aunt Adela surprised her, and, striking while 
 the iron was hot, settled matters with her, with her own 
 friend, and with Papa, who wrote, in grim silence, the 
 necessary cheques. He had never approved of boarding 
 schools for his women-folk. / 
 
 Neither did Laura. The door of the prim drawing-room 
 had not closed behind Aunt Adela, she had barely rubbed 
 Aunt Adela 's farewells from her cheeks, before she had 
 realized that she had been trapped again, that she hadn't 
 intended to go to school, that she would never meet Beetle at 
 'The Laburnums,' and that she was stuck there for a term 
 at least, because, when there is a chance that they may be 
 read by Mrs. Cloud who would tell Justin, one does not fill 
 one's letters home with supplications and lamentings. 
 Justin never once said that he wanted to come back! . . . 
 Finally, she was going to be horribly homesick. . . . 
 
 She was. She was put into the lowest class and she 
 hated every one. Exile, of the body or of the mind, always 
 roused, and always will rouse in her, I think, a bitter, 
 ardent devil, that, when she was a child, was completely 
 beyond her comprehension or control. She, who was all 
 for peace and pleasantry and quiet life, found herself in- 
 volved in wars and rumours of wars, in quarrels and in- 
 justice and defiances, that stamped themselves heavily, 
 like a blind pattern, upon a solid back-ground of nostalgia, 
 so that she spent her days, like any cat, fighting and dream- 
 ing.
 
 68 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 She endured for a full term : packed, in spite of protests, 
 all her property at the end of it: bade a polite and final 
 farewell to a bewildered head-mistress, and then came home 
 again. Once there, she refused to budge. 
 
 She needed a whipping, of course. Brackenhurst, deeply 
 interested, urged it upon Aunt Adela. But somehow it 
 was difficult to inflict upon the soft-eyed, mouse-like 
 creature that was Laura until you roused her. And 
 Laura never let Aunt Adela rouse her now-a-days, was a 
 good little girl and an obedient, with her Aunt Adela. As 
 Adela admitted to Brackenhurst, she was, in daily life, 
 docile enough. Aunt Adela, who could not understand 
 her contradictions, never realized that you might prune as 
 you pleased if you left her roots alone. 
 
 But Laura had it out with a grimly smiling grandfather, 
 who did not appear surprised. He heard what she had 
 to say, discussed the matter with her as he never did with 
 Adela, and, to every one's horror, let her have her way. 
 Possibly Laura's challenge to her aunt "Why can't 
 Gran 'papa teach me? He knows tons more than Miss 
 Massingberd ' ' tickled him. 
 
 At any rate Laura stayed at home, and her education, as 
 it achieved itself between the two of them, with occasional 
 help from Justin, was, if irregular, at least essentially satis- 
 fying. She was, of course, if you contrast her provision 
 with the full fare of the schools, fed and clad but scantily ; 
 but her scraps fell at least from ambrosial tables and her 
 rags were cloth-of-golden. And she throve. That is cer- 
 tain. 
 
 Aunt Adela *s next move, naturally, was to demand a 
 governess. But even her assiduity had not been able to dis- 
 cover any one whom Gran 'papa could endure for more 
 than a month. A week was usually enough for them both. 
 With visitors, half-hour visitors, he found it hard enough 
 to be uncritical; but to have a stranger, and a feminine 
 stranger at that, with an inevitable mannerism to jar his 
 fidgety niceness, definitely established in his household,
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 69 
 
 drove him into a fever of nervous irritation. His patient 
 daughter did her best, but it required more nerve than she 
 possessed to say, however sweetly, to an efficient young 
 woman with certificates and a silk petticoat : ' ' Oh, by the 
 way, Miss er , you don't blow your nose at meals, do 
 you?" and after the rout of Miss Runciman with her 
 nervous little giggle, of Miss Sandys who would talk to 
 Papa while he was eating, and of Miss Jenkins who used 
 slang and dropped her g's, Aunt Adela decided that an 
 English girl without an affectation was beyond discovery, 
 and that Papa must look after Laura's education by him- 
 self. Can you hear her s&tto-voee indignation? Can you 
 see her washing her long, twitching hands of the whole 
 affair? There is no doubt but that Papa was exceedingly 
 trying. All Brackenhurst knew it and pitied the poor 
 lady. But neither Brackenhurst nor she herself ever had 
 the moral courage to tell him so. 
 
 Laura, however, was none the worse off. She could read 
 and write, had the run of two houses in the matter of 
 books, and Justin never again so divinely discerning 
 Justin had given her a paint-box. Thus equipped, she was 
 left to potter at her own pace along the road to knowledge 
 of those inner and outer worlds in which, for the next fifty 
 years or so, she was to stage her eternal comedy of exist- 
 ence. 
 
 And she enjoyed herself. At ten twelve fourteen 
 she enjoyed herself, aesthetically at least, as keenly and 
 painfully as at any later period, blissfully absorbed in 
 words and colours and sounds, in discovering that the sky 
 is awfully blue and the earth so green, so green; but that 
 if she said big words to herself from Gran 'papa's dic- 
 tionary, 'azure,' 'translucent,' 'emerald,' ' lapis-lazuli, ' 
 sky and earth would deepen and glow till she was dazzled, 
 and that, although she could not get what she saw on to 
 paper, juicy as Winsor and Newtons were, at least she 
 could always try. And there the sable paint-brush was 
 certainly a help, though expensive!
 
 70 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 And though in these, as in all her adventures, she was 
 unescorted, she was not lonely. She was always aware 
 that there were guiding hands to right and left of her if she 
 chose to stretch out her own. Hands, indeed, that were 
 inclined to tug in opposite directions, and so, perhaps, held 
 her the steadier between extreme and extreme; for an in- 
 telligent young man convinced that he understands every- 
 thing, and a wise old one, still more sure that he knows 
 nothing, are no bad teachers for an imaginative child, 
 who worships the one and honours the others. 
 
 Justin, because she saw less of him ; because he was young ; 
 because he made her laugh; because he forgot her for 
 months and then remembered her again; because he let 
 her play in his room and learn her geography from his 
 stamp album, and put her in charge, in his absence, of his 
 innumerable collections; because he had white teeth and 
 delightful crinkles at the corners of his eyes when he put 
 back his head and laughed at her ; because, in short, he was 
 God Justin, naturally, influenced her development more 
 than old Mr. Valentine, though he, in his cold way, was 
 less unconscious of responsibility than Aunt Adela would 
 have you believe. Yet the amazing, amusing contrast in 
 the two men's attitudes to life and Books (the choice of 
 capital is Laura's) developed in her, all unconsciously, a 
 sense of humour, which is a sense of proportion, that never 
 withered, though she is to starve it ruthlessly in the years 
 that are labelled discreet. 
 
 When, for instance, Gran 'papa's grudging and suspicious 
 recognition of those hot-bloods Mr. Tennyson and Mr. 
 Dickens, was compared in her alert mind with Justin's 
 yawning admission that he really must wade through 'em 
 all some day, she would give a little gurgle of laughter all 
 to herself, though she did not really know why. But she 
 was sure her mother would have laughed too in that half- 
 forgotten fascinating way of hers and have made the 
 funniness obvious to Laura. Laura was sure of that. 
 Even Sam Weller was not quite so funny when you met
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 71 
 
 him by yourself but when Mother had read it aloud 
 oh, did the twins remember? But the twins never re- 
 membered anything. Never remembered, never cared for 
 anything but trains, and rigging up telephones in the 
 cherry trees, and catapulting robins, never wanted Laura 
 except at night when there were stories to be told, or when 
 they quarrelled with each other in the day-time. And cer- 
 tainly never noticed much difference between the edition of 
 Alice that Gran 'papa produced from a corner of his book- 
 shelf one birthday and the parcel from Justin by the post, 
 with the same familiar letterpress and most unfamiliar 
 drawings by a certain sacrilegious Mr. Rackham. There 
 again Gran 'papa's indignation, though she agreed with 
 him, struck her as humorous. In short, she was beginning, 
 what with one mentor and the other, to form a judgment 
 of her own, not to mention a morality. The fundamental 
 'shalt nots,' built up secretly, like coral rocks, in her child- 
 ish deeps, were, in the lull that precedes the teens, begin- 
 ning to show starkly above water. 
 
 "Never, never cry. 
 
 "It's nice to be in the right, but it makes them squash 
 you. 
 
 "Never argue with Gran 'papa. 
 
 "Never remind Justin of what he said last holidays. 
 
 ' ' Never say you 're tired. ' ' 
 
 In matters of art, too, though she enjoyed trying to look 
 through both ends of her human opera-glasses at once, she 
 had got into a habit (in self-defence, as it it were) of 
 using her own eyes in daily life. Glasses were a revelation, 
 of course, either end of them. Justin's display of remote, 
 romantic figures with curvy throats who really lived, in 
 London, and waved Yellow Backs (a horrid colour) and 
 sniffed at Grandpapa's Michael Angelo because he had a 
 broken nose and couldn't sniff back, was as exciting as it 
 was bewildering; but Gran 'papa's method of magnifying, 
 clarifying the old-fashioned deities of an art dictionary 
 into solid, satisfactory men and women, had also its charm
 
 72 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 for her. And the woman in her, that must dislike change 
 of any kind, found Gran 'papa the more dependable. 
 Justin had such different interests each holidays (he left 
 delicious books behind him when he went back to college) 
 that it was difficult to keep up; but Gran 'papa would, on 
 any given evening, be found reading the Nodes Ambro- 
 sianae with the same absorption as on any previous evening 
 of all Laura's years: Gran 'papa could be trusted to say 
 "Pretty enough, pretty enough but what about feet? 
 Hands and feet, my dear, hands and feet, if you want to 
 learn to draw," when he was shown the latest 'head' 
 (there were half a dozen battered casts for the borrowing 
 Caesar, Clytie, Antinous in the village schools) upon 
 which Laura had spent herself and her time and her beau- 
 tiful fourpenny indiarubber. 
 
 Yes Gran 'papa was dependable. He damped her, but 
 she was already intelligent enough to enjoy the tingle of 
 his cold water, and, always protesting, to know him in the 
 right. Yet how she grudged him his Tightness! At 
 twelve years old there is not much charm in a plaster cast 
 of a foot or in a muscular gentleman with his skin off, 
 when Clytie, half enchanted, smiles from her petals, and 
 you have made up your mind to do the most beautiful copy 
 of her that the world has ever seen by lunch-time, only 
 coloured, pale pink Clytie and orange sunflower, and send 
 it in to the Academy and get made an R.A. like Angelica 
 Kaufmann, who wasn't even English, as a little surprise 
 for Justin. 
 
 She was always, in secret, fantastically ambitious, but 
 her R.A. was one cobweb with her Helen of Troyship (you 
 should have seen Laura going straight to headquarters 
 Olympus and talking out the whole wretched business with 
 Zeus) or with the regency she undertook after delivering 
 up Elizabeth (in chains) to Mary Queen of Scots, rein- 
 stated and regal and happily converted to Protestantism 
 entirely through Laura's indefatigable personal exertions. 
 For Laura, to Aunt Adela's edified relief, was whole
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 73 
 
 heartedly Anglican, in spite of having to learn collects. 
 She did not explain, if she knew it, that church was a per- 
 petual joy because it had three stained-glass windows with 
 crimson figures, black crimson like the darkest carnations 
 in the big border, or Gran 'papa's port, a crimson to make 
 a small girl squirm with inexplicable pleasure: And be- 
 cause she could sit there and plan out the frescoes she 
 would one day, when she was grown-up and an R.A., paint 
 all over the white-washed walls and up into the barred 
 ceiling, being conveyed thither nightly by the Archangel 
 Raphael, who used to paint pictures too, in Rome, before 
 he was made a seraph, and so would naturally be interested. 
 The congregation, of course, were to be kept in ignorance 
 of the artist and a weekly increasing amazement until it 
 was finished. All but Justin. She would simply have to 
 tell Justin. . . . 
 
 That characteristic thought would be realized in char- 
 acteristic fashion. She was always dying to talk to him, 
 and there was never any time; for Justin even when not 
 enclouded in a silence that might not be broken, a silence 
 which always made Laura, quite unnecessarily, feel rebuked, 
 must still be considered, at any rate in his twenties, to have 
 enjoyed life most in monologue. So Laura, obedient to the 
 latest addition to her Codex Justinianus, "Never worry 
 him to talk," evolved a system of imaginary conversations 
 which more or less satisfied her. She invented a Justin of 
 her own, a Justin identical in speech and manner and ap- 
 pearance, a Justin who accompanied her wherever she 
 went, into whose sympathetic ear she poured, with a sort 
 of passionate vivacity, every thought and wish and fear 
 and marvel of her developing mind. 
 
 It was curious to catch her unawares, to see her trotting 
 down a garden path, obviously absorbed in a discussion that 
 required nods and laughter and expressive hands, and little 
 quick, questioning, upward glances, while she endeavoured 
 in vain to keep step with the long stride of an Invisible. 
 
 Intercourse with this Invisible who to Laura was one
 
 74 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 with was, indeed, the real Justin, was so satisfying that 
 when he arrived in the flesh for his holidays, she was able 
 to be satisfactory in her turn, to exist demurely as no more 
 than a domestic pet, with a trick of loosening his tongue 
 for him and the still more stimulating habit of listening 
 in intelligent admiration while it wagged. 
 
 She was quaintly accustomed, in the first half-hour of 
 reunion, to a sensation of depression, to be chilled, startled 
 into faint, disloyal protest "But but this isn't Justin! 
 I forgot he was like this." And then she would round in- 
 dignantly upon herself "Anyhow I like him this way." 
 But in a day or two ideal and real would have more or 
 less melted into one again, obstinate discrepancies being ex- 
 plained away by Laura airily enough "It's because I'm 
 not grown-up." Her child's faith in that panacea was 
 almost as strong as her faith in Justin. Yet that last 
 would be sorely tried upon occasion. Their differences, 
 when they occurred, were catastrophic very funny to 
 watch. There is the old simile of the Skye and the mastiff : 
 or imagine, if you like, Bottom in the Bower, and Titania 
 nearly frantic with him for not knowing (there's the trou- 
 ble she would not mind nearly so much if it were pure 
 wickedness, done a-purpose) but for not knowing that he 
 had just sat down so heavily upon a spread of cowslips 
 that there is little chance of a single gold-coated pensioner 
 being left alive when he gets up again. Not that it is fair 
 to compare Justin with Bottom. Justin, even in the twen- 
 ties, was not in the least egregious, only solid. He couldn 't 
 help it, could he, if he hadn 't any faults, or that his kindly 
 tolerance of her tantrums could drive Laura into nothing 
 more or less than a fuming replica of her Gran 'papa's 
 canary? (You never realized how red Laura's hair was 
 until you saw her in a passion.) But, in those encounters, 
 there was revealed a duality of temperament, a distinction 
 in quality, a difference in their grip of life, in the mere 
 meaning, sometimes, that they attached to the words they 
 used, which made you marvel at the attraction that they
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 75 
 
 undoubtedly had for each other. For if Laura enjoyed 
 living in his pocket, Justin would have been equally dis- 
 concerted if, one fine day, he had not found her there, like 
 his loose money, and his handkerchief, and his pencil-case, 
 ready to his hand. Yet, as I say, they sparred. There 
 was a clash of claims occasionally. It was not always easy 
 to reconcile ''what Mother used to do" with "Justin 
 says. ' ' 
 
 There were the birds' eggs, for instance, cause of the 
 most serious of their differences and the last, before she 
 became a big girl and went away to France to be finished, 
 as Aunt Adela phrased it. Justin, as you know, had the 
 magpie instinct that as pleasantly infantizes the ponderous 
 male as a pink paper cap from a cracker the bald head of 
 an uncle at a Christmas dinner. He collected as Brack- 
 enhurst, wisely refusing to involve itself with the objective 
 case, would explain to its visitor behind a kid glove or a 
 convenient Prayer Book 
 
 "Yes the Cloud pew the only son. Oh, rolling! 
 Oxford intellectual, you know He collects." 
 
 Brackenhurst was right: he did collect. Collect? He 
 trawled. There were no half-way measures. Interest him 
 in a subject, from Caesar's wives to Palaeolithic Toothpicks, 
 and he had no peace until he had pursued that subject, 
 netted it, stunned it with books of reference, stripped it of 
 its robe of mystery, taken it to pieces, turned it inside out. 
 And finally, when it was quite dead and done for, and its 
 poor soul fled, he would hang up the dry bones in triumph 
 in his den and look round for some one upon whom to dis- 
 charge his accumulated information. 
 
 His mother was usually the sacrifice his mother in her 
 pretty parlour, with Justin's Progress running round the 
 walls chronologically, from 'Grace Darling' and 'Hope' 
 on the orange, to Burne- Jones, 'Marriage a la Mode,' Post- 
 Impressionism, and Japanese prints. She did not really 
 mind, though he scraped the wall-paper dreadfully shift- 
 ing things each holiday, and she couldn't see why he
 
 76 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 should insist on moving 'Wedded/ into Cook's bedroom, 
 though Cook, of course, was very pleased. But sometimes, 
 especially in the Beardsley phase, she did wonder, uneasily, 
 if she were being over-educated. 
 
 Yet his changes of view did not disturb her as they dis- 
 turbed Laura, because, wise for all her simplicity, she 
 could always trace them back, as Laura could not, to the 
 influence of the moment. He had so many acquaintances 
 whom he called friends, he, who had never yet felt the need 
 of a friend. 
 
 It was always the same. Damon collected stamps for a 
 fortnight, and Justin, Pythias of the hour, would go and 
 do likewise, and be amazed, a year later, to find that Damon 
 showed no interest in the three albums he had contrived to 
 fill meanwhile, beyond merely and inaccurately protesting 
 that thd beastly things always had bored him anyway. 
 Justin could not understand that. Through the school 
 years, however, he had naturally attracted his like and pos- 
 sessed, in consequence, a heterogeneous treasury of coins, 
 and cigarette pictures, and birds' eggs, and butterflies, and 
 walking sticks, and medals, all correctly labelled and cased, 
 and faithfully supervised by Laura, into whose char ey 
 had long ago been given, partly because he was ge 
 fond of his foundling and ready to humour her, p*. je- 
 cause he had been impressed, from the first, by her neat 
 ways and dexterous finger-tips. He admired neatness and 
 precision as only a thoroughly untidy man can, and Laura 
 always knew where he had left his tobacco pouch. 
 
 He seldom entirely outgrew his crazes, could always be 
 fired anew by a rummage. Cigarette pictures, certainly, 
 had definitely ceased to charm him, to the benefit of the 
 twins (Laura, jealous-eyed, did not in the least appreciate 
 the compliment of being passed over) but he still brought 
 home an occasional carved stick, and his fourpenny bits 
 and George III pennies had one by one given up their pads 
 of honour to quite rare and beautiful coins. In fact, if he 
 had not met Bellew
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 77 
 
 And then it rained. 
 
 Justin yawned and fidgeted about the room, and settled 
 down to a book and shut it up again with a bang and sent 
 it skating across the polished table. He wanted to go out 
 . . . He had nothing to do. ... Vacation was rather a bore 
 sometimes. . . . He wondered if he should get out his 
 stamps. . . . He hadn't looked at his stamps lately. . . . 
 Stamps were rather a bore. . . . He yawned again. 
 
 " 'Rain, rain, go to Spain/ " chanted Laura, drumming 
 on the glass. She was kneeling on the window-seat, looking 
 out at the wall of wet leafage that faced her across the lawn, 
 for the garden had been hung on the breast of deep woods. 
 Mrs. Cloud complained that the trees darkened the house 
 and made it damp, and Justin would offer to have them 
 thinned, and then Mrs. Cloud would talk hurriedly about 
 central heating, and Justin would laugh at her; because 
 his mother had never yet been known to sanction the de- 
 struction of an acorn. She had the characteristic passion 
 of a shy woman for trees for the quiet, deep-rooted trees 
 that shelter and enclose. 
 
 " 'Rain, rain ' " began Laura again, energetically. 
 
 3 stow it, Laura ! ' ' grunted Justin. 
 J %e rain, either because, like any one else, it hates 
 to ~ its name shouted after it, or because it had been 
 at work since seven and it was now close upon eleven 
 o'clock, did suddenly slacken and waver in a half-hearted 
 and apologetic fashion that was most encouraging. 
 
 "It's stopping! It's going! *You see in five minutes! 
 I knew it would, or the birds wouldn't make such a row. 
 Look at them on the lawn, Justin." She thrust her open 
 palms out of the window to feel the weather. It is stop- 
 ping." 
 
 "Oh, by the way, that reminds me," Justin brightened. 
 "Let's have a look at the birds' eggs. Haven't seen 'em 
 for years." And he took the key of the fat little cabinet 
 from a reluctant Laura. But he did not notice her reluc- 
 tance. "Ever heard of Bellew?"
 
 78 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 "British Feather Folk?" Laura glanced up at a row 
 of maroon volumes. 
 
 ''Yes." Then, as he wrenched at a stiff drawer: "I 
 say, you can't have dusted here lately." 
 
 She flushed. 
 
 "I just hate " she was beginning, and then she 
 
 checked herself. "What about him, Justin?" 
 
 ' ' Oh, I came across him last term. He was lecturing. I 
 tell you, he's a man and a half. What he doesn't know 
 about birds would go into a wren's egg. We pal'd up, 
 rather. He's quite young. He's made me as keen as 
 mustard. Of course I know nothing compared with him. 
 He spends his life at it." 
 
 "Taking birds' eggs?" enquired Laura frigidly. "lake 
 a little boy?" 
 
 But he swept on unheeding. He Had got his half-a- 
 dozen sectioned trays pulled out and spread round him on 
 the floor. 
 
 "Not much here," he commented disgustedly. "Spar- 
 rows and chaffinches and robins. Bellew would hoot." 
 He laughed. "That's the right word. He's like a bird 
 himself, you know. All the birds that ever were, rolled 
 into one. Cocks his eye at you before he speaks and 
 ruffles up his hair like a parrot when he's keen. I never 
 knew such a man. They say South Kensington would 
 give its ears for his collection. And he can tell you every 
 blessed thing every blessed bird in England thinks, or 
 says, or does, from the egg on. You should hear him doing 
 the notes. Hear that blackbird in the wood? You can't 
 tell whether that squawk is temper, or a worm gone down 
 the wrong way, or a love affair. Nor can I. But if you 
 got hold of Bellew " 
 
 Laura sniffed. She was sorry, but she did not like Mr. 
 Bellew, and she didn't care who knew it. 
 
 "It's squawking at Tom. He's always under that nest. 
 He got two of the babies last year. And it's not a black-
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 79 
 
 bird, it's a garden warbler. They always build in that 
 tree." 
 
 "A garden warbler? How do you know?" 
 
 "British Feather Folk." Laura twinkled. And then 
 "Mother loved birds." 
 
 He scanned his trays. 
 
 ' ' What luck ! I haven 't got a garden warbler. And it 's 
 stopped raining. Come on and show me the nest." 
 
 "Justin, you're not going to take the eggs?" 
 
 "Well, what do you think? I tell you I'm going in 
 for it again seriously. Come on." 
 
 She made no movement. He glanced up at her, sur- 
 prised by her silence into an observant glance. 
 
 "What's up, Laura?" 
 
 She turned a distressed face to him. 
 
 "If you start Wilfred and James will think they can 
 too. And it's been so difficult to stop them." 
 
 He laughed. 
 
 "If you think you can stop kids taking eggs " 
 
 "But they haven't. Not once. Mother hated it so. 
 But if you start " 
 
 "My good kid, where 's the harm? Birds can't count." 
 
 She flamed up at him in her sudden way. 
 
 ' ' Harm ? How would you like having your insides blown 
 out before you 'd ever been born ? ' ' 
 
 He chuckled and took up his cap. 
 
 "Oh, rot! Come on!" 
 
 She shook her head. 
 
 "Oh, all right then!" and he ran downstairs whis- 
 tling. 
 
 She sat on the window-seat, her leg tucked under her 
 and watched him swing across the lawn and dive into the 
 wood, and still sat there, twiddling the latch and thinking 
 things out. After all, did it matter? . . . Birds had so 
 many children. . . . Birds couldn't count. ... If Justin 
 began collecting eggs again he would be in the woods all
 
 80 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 day. . . . Would it could it matter just going with him? 
 ... If one didn't take eggs oneself? . . . 
 
 But the facts were too clear for her. Birds-nesting was 
 cruel. . . . Mother never let you. . . . There was nothing 
 nothing to be done. . . . 
 
 Justin had been gone ages. . . . She supposed he would 
 be out all the morning now. . . . He had left the room in 
 a most dreadfully untidy state. . . . Oh, well ! 
 
 She set to work. 
 
 It was in a very damp heap, on a very tidy floor, that 
 half an hour later a tactless maid discovered her. But 
 Laura, scrambling to her feet, forestalled all comment. 
 
 "I happen," said Laura, with great dignity, "to have 
 a little bit of a cold. It's lunch-time, isn't it? Good- 
 bye, Mary. I'm going home now." 
 
 And home she went. 
 
 Her guardian angel was very much pleased with her. 
 But the devil, who happened to be passing, though he of- 
 fered his congratulations, opined that it would be worth 
 his while to come back that way in a year or two.
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 SHE was sixteen when she discovered (inaccurately) that 
 England is an island, that beyond its waters again there 
 is what, superficially if deceptively, you call land, and what 
 you call people, busy, vivid, quick-tongued, real to them- 
 selves, yet to you unconvincing, phantasmagoric, like the 
 land and people of a play. 
 
 She was not consciously insular. On the contrary, from 
 her railway carriage and her pension, her sight-seeing, her 
 studio and her walks abroad, she looked out upon the new 
 order of existence with fascinated and enthusiastic inter- 
 est. And France responded, on accasion, with empresse- 
 ment. The glance of your average Frenchman, not neces- 
 sarily discourteous, is nevertheless always and embarrass- 
 ingly instructive. She had begun to realize that she was 
 English : she was now made aware that she was good-look- 
 ing. She was to take no credit; but this was her birth- 
 right and her blessing. Wonderful facts! She had her 
 moments of pharisaic thankfulness to Providence for thus 
 equipping her, as she plunged with zest into the new life. 
 Like a doubtful swimmer she put a foot down, now and 
 then, just to feel the safe English ground still under her, 
 but secretly, shamefast: on the surface she became, with 
 the dear, ridiculous adaptability of the teens, very French 
 indeed French enough, in speech and air and manner, let 
 alone clothing, to appal Justin but that comes later. She 
 discovered France. She had her youthful right, I think, to 
 a spoil or two. 
 
 It was her age of discovery. She discovered the Louvre, 
 and love, and Wagner, and Marcel waves, and Mounet- 
 Sully, and Botticelli, and how to put on a hat. She was 
 greedy. She swallowed enough to give her indigestion for 
 
 81
 
 82 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 years, as indeed it did, and still, like a fledgeling, squawked 
 for more; but she enjoyed her own insatiability. If she 
 could have had Justin, the imaginary, perceptive Justin, 
 to talk to once a week, she would have been happy. She 
 always missed Justin. 
 
 But among the endless other things she had also discov- 
 ered that a year has only fifty-two weeks in it, fifty-two 
 series of seven definite days ; that it is no interminable road 
 disappearing into the mists of the future; that it is no 
 more, indeed, than a streaking drive down a Paris street, 
 with busy months to right and left of her, like shops that 
 she had no time to explore. Terrible, how time went, 
 when there was much to see, and do, and learn, before she 
 went back to Brackenhurst. Dear old Brackenhurst ! She 
 meant to reform Brackenhurst. Justin would back her. 
 . . . Lectures in the schools on oh, you know, interesting 
 people Corneille and Racine and Anatole France (she 
 was nothing if not catholic) and some really decent recita- 
 tions at the penny readings. . . . And the drawing-room 
 must be done up ... black walls and futurist cushions . . . 
 and get rid of the Landseers. . . . She should enjoy her- 
 self when she returned to Brackenhurst if Justin backed 
 her. . . . She wondered what he would say to the way she 
 did her hair? . . . She couldn't think why Aunt Adela 
 wrote such fussy letters about finding Brackenhurst quiet ? 
 Because she had been to the opera twice in a week, she sup- 
 posed. . . . But Aunt Adela wouldn't understand how 
 absurdly cheap and besides, she had paid for it herself 
 out of her birthday tip. . . . Aunt Adela needn't think 
 she didn't realize how good it was of Gran 'papa to send 
 her to Paris. . . . Aunt Adela might know she would be 
 careful. . . . But a franc was only tenpence, not a shilling 
 . . . and she had sold the picture she had been copying at 
 the Louvre ... a lady, an American, had come up and 
 liked it and bought it ! Three pounds seventy-five francs ! 
 Gran 'papa needn't send her any more pocket-money: she 
 could last for months on that. ... As for finding Bracken-
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 83 
 
 hurst quiet, she meant to turn the loose-box into an atelier 
 when she got back, and paint the entire village. She won- 
 dered if Gran 'papa would sit to her? ... A beard was 
 such a comfort . . . mouths were always the trouble. . . . 
 
 All this in the first months. But you can see how the 
 old sullen, childish distrust of everybody was wearing itself 
 out. She was astonished to find that people were inclined 
 to like her at sight, and, intrigued by such original be- 
 haviour, she unbent, responded, and ended by acquiring in 
 her turn a habit of appreciation. 
 
 She liked life. She liked her pension. She liked the 
 courteous French girls and the bravura Americans, and 
 their world of scent, and powder, and trim waist belts, 
 and Smart Sets, and candy, and complicated love affairs. 
 It amused her immensely, and did not for an instant im- 
 press her as having anything to do with real life. Real 
 life was the other side of the Channel. Unconsciously, 
 however, the views of her fellows, and the books they 
 read, their surreptitious cigarettes, and their ready and 
 untruthful tongues, had a certain influence. She read La 
 Rochefoucauld, with a "Yes, indeed," expression that 
 might have tickled even that disillusioned gentleman, 
 bought a powder-puff and sometimes remembered to use it, 
 told a lie or two and was never found out. That im- 
 pressed her. In Brackenhurst one at least had conscience- 
 ache. She acquired a bosom friend and defended, upon 
 occasion, two solid and reform-clad Germans from the rest 
 of the dormitory. In return she discovered that they had 
 adored her for weeks. She liked that. She discovered 
 that she could talk musingly and without effort, that it 
 was perfectly easy to be at the top of her classes. In spite 
 of her foreignness she became the show pupil and she 
 liked that too. She wished that Justin could see her some- 
 times. . . . She discovered that she could act (indeed some 
 devil dispossessed her at charades and dressing-up, lurked 
 behind her eyes, rapturous and Bacchanal), that she could 
 string words together for the school plays, that she had
 
 84. FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 a pretty voice, that she could captain an emergency, that, 
 in short, she was a success. This was perfectly delightful ! 
 She only wished there were a way of telling Justin exactly 
 what a charming person every one thought her, without 
 appearing conceited. She tried, in one or two letters, but 
 it couldn't be done. She had to tear them up. 
 
 She heard from Justin sometimes. They corresponded 
 in sets of threes and fives letter, answer, letter or letter, 
 answer, letter, answer, letter and then a pause of months. 
 His half sheets, terse, generalizing, almost void of person- 
 ality, were the events of her exile, a double source of de- 
 light. They were Justin's letters and they had to be an- 
 swered ! It was in the code, you see, that you only wrote 
 to Justin turn and turn about, and never twice running, 
 except birthdays and Christmas and Easter or anything 
 special, like sending a New Year parcel to Mrs. Cloud, or 
 when you hadn't heard for a very long time; because let- 
 ters bored Justin. And besides 
 
 Certainly a changing Laura, though she herself could 
 not have explained to you the meaning of that "and 
 besides " 
 
 That she was homesick for him or for home but indeed 
 the two words were synonyms to her we already know; 
 but when the prospect of a finishing school had been first 
 mooted, she had made up her curious mind, so plastic and 
 yet so stubborn, that she would not be silly again as she 
 had been when she was young (surely the Great Gulf is 
 fixed between twelve and sixteen) and that it was worth 
 her while to buy with only two black years the chance of 
 growing as good and great and wise as Justin that is to 
 say, nearly as good and as great and as wise. She knew 
 her limitations. And then, when she came back, she would 
 be able to be friends with Justin real friends not a 
 little girl to be played with any more. . . . She would be 
 'adequate' . . . She was very jealous of that adjective. 
 ' ' Adequate ! Oh, an awfully adequate chap ! " . . . Justin 
 was always saying that people he approved were "ade-
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 85 
 
 quate" . . . Very good. ... He should say so of her. . . . 
 To that end, behold her tethered, a willing sacrifice, to a 
 French Grammar and verbs of unmentionable irregularity ! 
 
 Also, a second motive for docility, there were studios in 
 Paris pictures statues of the gods teachers of the Arts 
 one Eodin and a thing called a Salon. She might learn 
 to paint, really paint! 
 
 She got her way. She had been sent to a quiet, middle- 
 class pension, owned by intelligent women, who taught the 
 newcomers themselves, while the French girls and the more 
 advanced foreigners attended various classes. It was easy 
 to find a studio for Laura. 
 
 And so, for nearly two years, she worked three days a 
 week, and for three days sat enchanted, soaking herself 
 in strange oils, smeared from her eyebrows to her aching 
 palette thumb, painting portraits and dreaming dreams. 
 And tragic Monsieur La Motte, that great artist who could 
 not paint, who taught victoriously by word of mouth, be- 
 cause his art must out and his hands could not obey him, 
 Monsieur La Motte, swan-herd fallen on hard times, yet 
 ever alert for a cygnet in the gaggle of geese he must 
 drive for a living, Monsieur La Motte watched and peered 
 and waited. At last, when her two years were nearly at 
 an end, and the studio-talk that frothed like a fountain 
 was less of Cubism and the expensiveness of rose-madder, 
 Ingres, Bergson, Strindberg, symbolic colour schemes and 
 the Eternal Return (for they were an enquiring, philo- 
 sophical crew) and more and more and ever more of Eng- 
 land and its delectable villages, high in the Kentish hills, 
 he could contain himself no longer. He assumed his con- 
 spiratorial hat and went, then and there, to call upon his 
 old friends the Demoiselles Dunois. 
 
 Here, he explained, was his chance. Here was the pupil 
 for whom he had waited. Talent enormous talent. 
 Genius? Ah, that was another matter that he could not 
 say not yet (he spoke as might a doctor, finger on 
 pulse, awaiting the crisis) but talent there was by the pot-
 
 86 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 fill, talent to deceive the crowd, and, he bade them observe, 
 a temperament to back it. Fire was there, mingling 
 paradoxically with the cold English blood, like the abomi- 
 nable English drink, the cold yet burning ouiski-soda. Not 
 for nothing had the door between atelier and Monsieur's 
 sanctum stood ajar. Could he have Mademoiselle Valen- 
 tine for two years, only two years they should see what 
 they should see! But he understood it was a question of 
 expense. Now would it not be possible ? 
 
 His black eyes and his pointed beard and his long yellow 
 fingers all twinkled together as he elaborated his ideas, till 
 he looked like a Svengali possessed by the spirit of Mr. 
 Samuel Pickwick. The Demoiselles Dunois, who admired 
 him immensely, and were fond, too, of Laura, responded 
 with enthusiasm. Heads together over the coffee cups they 
 hatched their kindly plot. 
 
 But other folk, fortunately or not, had been plotting 
 too. Mrs. Cloud dreaded the March winds as she did not 
 dread the still cold of true winter weather. Justin, at 
 home six months now, was growing restless again though 
 his lounge round the world had bored him at the time. He 
 had started out in high enough spirits and with more 
 money in his pockets than is good for the youthful male. 
 But he had not the knack of enjoying himself illegitimately. 
 He was virtuous, because vice did not appeal to him and he 
 had not the inquisitiveness of little minds. Yet he cried 
 for Our Lady the Moon like any other youngster. It was 
 borne in upon him that he was plodding through en- 
 chanted lands with the thoroughness of a typical tourist, 
 and it annoyed him hugely. Yet he had no notion of how 
 to help himself. He was relieved to get home again. His 
 mother was very sweet. He enjoyed unpacking the spoils 
 of his comfortable Odyssey and scattering them about the 
 house, though the birds '-egg collection still held the place 
 of honour in his den. It was considerably enlarged since 
 the days of Laura's protest, and he was tenacious of old 
 likes and dislikes. One of the first visits he paid on his
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 87 
 
 return was to Bellew, who welcomed him with chirrups of 
 pleasure. Everybody was always delighted to see Justin. 
 He had, quite unconsciously, the disarming assurance of 
 the big strange dog with the wet coat, who greets you with 
 vigorous affection at church parade. "Why shouldn't you 
 be pleased to see him ? And you are, you know, in spite of 
 splashed taffetas. You cannot help yourself. 
 
 Bellew and Justin picked up their acquaintance where 
 they had dropped it eighteen months before, and agreed 
 better than ever, enjoying, not so much each other, as their 
 common interest in a common hobby. Bellew even talked 
 tentatively of the voyage he intended to make up the coast, 
 and on to the Hebrides to take photographs of sea-birds 
 and their nests for his new book. He needed an active 
 assistant. But Justin, tempted, was non-committal. He 
 was only just home. His mother did not grow younger. 
 He was too fond of her even to tell her of the idea lest 
 she should insist, yet, with time heavy on his hands, it 
 made him restless, the readier for a change when she, 
 coughing a little and looking, in spite of her comfort- 
 able house and the furs from Russia, a frail, nipped 
 leaf of a woman, talked of the Riviera or Italy? She 
 had not been to Italy since her honeymoon, and Justin, for 
 all his globe-trotting, had not been at all. What about 
 Italy? Italy would be delightful if Justin wouldn't find 
 it dull, with just the two of them? 
 
 It was then that Justin said I am always glad that it 
 was Justin who said 
 
 "Well, what about Laura?"
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 WELL, what about Laura? 
 
 Will you take a peep at Laura in bed with the remains 
 of a cold, on her chill March birthday Laura, very sorry 
 for herself, languidly undoing her presents miraculously 
 cured by the arrival of The Letter ? 
 
 You and I, of course, can sympathize would dearly love 
 a trip to Italy with the right people. But there we pause. 
 
 But be eighteen: be soaked to your crude soul in art, 
 and the literature and the history and the legend of art, 
 till Colour is your romance and Line your religion, and 
 gradually, inevitably, Italy, that tenth muse, grows in your 
 mind as love grows, from a mere word to an idea, from an 
 idea to a symbol, from a symbol to a real presence that will 
 not be denied, that calls to you as the Holy Places called to 
 the Crusaders long ago. And if into the bargain you have 
 been homesick 
 
 Be eighteen and homesick it is worth your while be- 
 fore you go to Italy with Justin and Mrs. Cloud ! 
 
 Italy and Justin Justin and Italy ! It was beyond be- 
 lief. One delight, indeed, so far neutralized the other, 
 that she did at last attain a state of calm, 'French calm,' 
 in which she wound up her affairs, packed her trunk she 
 would not travel for a week, but she packed her trunk that 
 day and, interviewing the Demoiselles Dunois, broke the 
 miraculous news. 
 
 It was almost inevitable, while Life, like Monna Lisa, 
 wears her little crooked smile, that Laura should have 
 overwhelmed those enthusiasts at the instant of their 
 assembly to do the like by her. But in the joyous hubbub 
 of keys and speeds and gesture, their voices, as the elder, 
 soon rose predominant, and Laura must listen while they 
 
 88
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 89 
 
 detailed, amid appeals to Monsieur La Motte, benevolent 
 in the seat of honour, their good-fairy plans. 
 
 The English mistress was leaving and Laura should teach 
 in her stead, unpaid, yet with board and lodging and free 
 mornings in return. That, they promised, should arrange 
 itself as Monsier decided, Monsieur who, with a generosity 
 that was like him, was throwing open his studio to Laura, 
 asking no more of her than that she should help, when 
 she could, those whose talent was less than her own. For 
 Monsieur was of opinion that she had such talent as justi- 
 fied and so on, until for sheer lack of breath they paused 
 
 in delighted anticipation of her delight. 
 
 Of course she was grateful, touched and grateful. A 
 week earlier, so kind had Paris grown, so far at times her 
 England, she might even have been tempted. But with 
 Mrs. Cloud's letter tucked away in her blouse, the words 
 that were rung in her ears, 'career,' 'success,' 'ambition,' 
 'future,' could not convey their meaning, died away again 
 as words, mere words. 
 
 But it was kind of them most extraordinarily kind. She 
 was glad (with her quick flush) that Monsieur thought she 
 had talent and of course it was a lovely idea but but 
 "You see they have asked me my friends to go to 
 Italy!" 
 
 They did not seem to understand. 
 
 "Italy! and my friends!" She tried to explain the 
 situation calmly and decorously ; but it was not easy : 
 
 "My friends! and I haven't seen them for two years! 
 My English friends! From my home! I'm to go to Italy 
 to Florence Fra Angelico Benozzo Gozzoli six weeks 
 and perhaps Rome with my friends my English 
 friends ! ' ' 
 
 She was nearly crying with delight. And then, with 
 quick compunction at their blank faces 
 
 "But you do understand how grateful I am? I simply 
 hate leaving. You do understand?" 
 
 The sisters assured her that they did understand. She
 
 90 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 should have her holiday, and her visit home, and then 
 she would come back? In two, three, four months, she 
 would want to come back. Because a talent was a gift of 
 God and the school would be so proud and, who knew, a 
 picture in the Salon! Of course they understood. She 
 should go. But afterwards she would come back? 
 
 She was bewildered by their solicitude. It was the first 
 time in her life that affection had come to her unsought. 
 Its display touched her (that they should actually be fond 
 of her ! ) but it embarrassed her too. She could only smile 
 and nod and thank them again and again, and promise to 
 think over all they had said, and write to them from Italy. 
 
 "She will come back," said the sisters confidently, when 
 at last Laura had escaped. "So young a thing her holi- 
 day natural enough! But the talent is there, as Mon- 
 sieur says. And talent will out. She will come back." 
 
 Monsieur La Motte listened to them as he had listened to 
 Laura, in silence. It was not until coffee had been served 
 and drunk, and the dregs were cold in his cup, that he de- 
 livered himself. 
 
 "She will not come back," he decided with a sigh, as he 
 rose to go. 
 
 "You will see! In two months you will see!" they 
 consoled him sagaciously. 
 
 "She will not come back."
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 SHE was to meet the Clouds at Lucerne. She had hoped 
 for Paris, but there was the Swiss-German adorer who 
 would not be denied. Laura never found it easy to deny. 
 So she spent a good-natured, chafing week in the Berne 
 household, which, falling in love with her, enthusiastically 
 and inexorably overfed her. From that hot-bed of senti- 
 ment and rich meals the train bore her away one fine spring 
 morning, with a pimple on her tongue, but her duty done. 
 
 It was a bother being nice to people who bored you . . . 
 but it was the only way you could pay back the gods for 
 being nice to you . . . ran her philosophy. She only 
 hoped the gods would go on being nice when they met 
 again. . . . Two years was a long time. . . . Would the 
 gods have altered much? . . . One can't tell from photo- 
 graphs. . . . But gods don't alter . . . therein lies their 
 
 godhead. . . . Now she, Laura Oh, how she wondered 
 
 if he would like her in long skirts ? 
 
 The train fussed into the unplatformed station-way at 
 half-past one, and tipped her out, as it seemed afterwards, 
 onto the very lake edge, much as an elderly fairy, with a 
 sense of duty, drops a stray godchild in elf -land for a week ; 
 and so puffed off again in its overworked fashion, leaving 
 her, open-mouthed, before the enchanted hollow of Lucerne. 
 
 She might well gasp, forgetting her holiday, forgetting 
 even " Justin-an '-Italy, " for long intoxicated minutes; for 
 she was a painter, a painter unproven, a painter who had 
 just sold her birthright for that same Justin-an '-Italy, but 
 who was not therefore free of the torment of her eyes, her 
 all-absorbing eyes and her itching finger-tips : and Lucerne 
 was a portrait that day fit for the ten-leagued canvas and 
 
 91
 
 92 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 the brush of comet's hair, a king's daughter, glorious 
 within, revealed and royal in a dazzle of blue. 
 
 It was a blue beyond belief, a blue enamelled thinly upon 
 the gold plate of the sun, upon the antique-black of space 
 itself. The great mountains, the rounded sky, the -very air 
 seemed carved, solidly, like the cup in the fairy tale, out 
 of a single sapphire, fretted over with pearls that were 
 clouds and the diamond glitter of the snow line, while far 
 below the thin bridge lay across the lake like a felled tree 
 in a clearing of English bluebells. 
 
 "My word!" marvelled Laura inadequately. "My 
 word!" and then, with a deep breath "Oh, my word!" 
 
 Her hand was at her mouth, hiding it because it trembled, 
 as she stared and stared. She never outgrew that instinc- 
 tive, characteristic gesture, that unconscious obedience to 
 the law of her experience "Never show what you feel." 
 Her delight in that triumphant blue was thoughtless, al- 
 most physical: she felt it whirl her like a wind. Yet, be- 
 cause she must always share her good things, at the back of 
 her mind an indignant outcry began for "all of them" 
 in forsaken Rue Honorine. 
 
 ' ' My word ! Wouldn r t they go mad ! It 's a shame ! ' ' 
 
 She could see the broad thumb of Monsieur plastering 
 an imaginary canvas with unctuous blobs and quorls, and 
 the pretty pastel ardour of Elisabeth, and the despair of 
 the water-colourists : she heard again the rumorous voice of 
 the classe, the depths and shallows of appreciation, the 
 shared delight in vision of those who have learned, who are 
 learning to see: and then, mingling with those familiar 
 voices, a voice yet more familiar, uplifted in the immemorial 
 opening 
 
 "Pretty good, isn't it?" 
 
 "Justin!" 
 
 She wheeled. Beauty was forgotten, was a nothing, a 
 phrase, a dead leaf. The high hills were cardboard, the 
 sky a back-cloth and no more, for the well-to-do tweed 
 figure, the one figure of Henry Justin Cloud.
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 93 
 
 And thus we teach Nature her place ! 
 
 "Justin! Oh, how lovely! But you're not due till 
 four! Where's Mrs. Cloud? I was just off to see the 
 Lion. I thought there was time. You said four. Oh, I 
 am disappointed. I meant to meet you properly, on the 
 platform. You did say four!" She was comically un- 
 willing to give up the picture in her mind, of herself on the 
 platform and the train dashing in, and the faces at the 
 carriage window. 
 
 He explained as they shook hands and beamed at each 
 other 
 
 "We changed our minds started a day sooner to break 
 the journey for Mother. She 's at the hotel. We could nip 
 up and see the Lion still if you liked, while she has her 
 nap. There 's loads of time. " 
 
 Laura was all eagerness and acquiescence, and they 
 crossed the bridge and swung off at Justin's pace up the 
 sweep of the road. Not that she wanted to see the Lion 
 qua Lion any more, though five minutes ago she had been 
 as earnest a sightseer as ever read an illustrated Life of 
 Thorwaldsen and What the Moon Saw. But as a mediary 
 between her shyness and this stranger who was Justin, who 
 had caught her before she had powedered her nose and put 
 her thoughts in order, the Lion was invaluable. Justin, 
 with a little help, would talk contentedly about him, and 
 that would give her time. . . . Time for what? But that 
 she could not have told you. 
 
 The truth was, of course, that the excitement that had 
 sustained her for weeks was over, and its effect, like that 
 of any other drug, wearing off. But she only knew that 
 she was suddenly limp and shy. She smiled and talked 
 with her mouth, but her eyes were quite grave as she 
 watched Justin. She felt a forgotten, uneasily familiar 
 sensation creeping over and through her, as a mist or a 
 ghost goes through locked doors, a ghost that spoke with 
 her own voice, whispering "But but this isn't Justin? 
 I had forgotten he was like this -"
 
 94, FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 And yet he was just the same as ever. . . . Not quite 
 so tall, perhaps, as she had remembered him ... or she 
 had grown taller. . . . He was pleased to see her, she was 
 sure, but he had nothing much to say until they reached the 
 Lion. The Lion was most helpful. . . . 
 
 Justin explained to Laura that it was a Neo-Classic 
 Lion, and therefore less admirable than the Lions in 
 Trafalgar Square, which were from life Zoo life. "I 
 see!" said Laura. She was sure he must have been read- 
 ing the same biography, but she thought she had better not 
 ask him. But she did ask him why he approved of the 
 Trafalgar Square Lions, when he had so often girded at 
 'The Monarch of the Glen' in Green Gates parlour. 
 Justin, warming, said that Landseer was a photographer, 
 but that photography was honester than imitation anyway, 
 and explained that Thorwaldsen had got his ideas from the 
 Assyrian plaques in the British Museum. They would 
 look them up one day when they got home again and 
 then she would see. All this, and now that he was once 
 started, so very much more, with such a familiar air of un- 
 burdening himself, such an assumption of her entire in- 
 terest, such an implied re-definition of her status as his 
 particular property, that the ghost melted away again, as 
 it always did when Justin smiled at her, and she said 
 defiantly to the Lion 
 
 ' ' I don 't care. I like him this way. ' '
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 UP and up and up went the train and Laura's spirits with 
 it. Mrs. Cloud was in one corner of the compartment and 
 Justin in the other, and there were two squares of glass, 
 unlike prim English carriage windows, opening upon 
 wonders, black mountains and clouds and brilliant grass, 
 and under their feet, but far below, the terraced lines of 
 the track over which they had already passed. Sometimes 
 a drift of white hid them. Laura thought that it was 
 smoke, but Justin said "no clouds." Imagine! She 
 was so high up that she was looking down on clouds ! 
 
 Justin laughed at her. 
 
 "Beats Beech Hill, doesn't it?" 
 
 "No, it doesn't," she said instantly; but she grew more 
 and more excited. And all the time they talked to her 
 and she to them though Justin was quieter than she 
 thought he need be when he hadn't seen her for two years 
 of all things under the sun and of how glad she was to 
 see them: and the train climbed higher and higher. It 
 stopped once, at a snow-covered siding, for them to drink 
 coffee in inch-thick cups, and the coffee or the air, the air 
 that was like old still wine, must have gone to Laura's 
 head a little. She certainly talked too much, fluttering 
 like a distracted butterfly between Paris and Justin, and 
 the right-hand window and the left-hand window, and how 
 was Gran 'papa and Savonarola and cushions for Mrs. 
 Cloud. She did not even stop in the tunnel. . And the dis- 
 carded ghost of a disappointment found that Laura was 
 not the only person in the carriage worth haunting. Justin 
 had smoked himself into one of his silences. He was not 
 sure that Laura was improved. Her voice was rather high. 
 He thought that she was showing off. 
 
 95
 
 96 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 He was right. She was so desperately anxious that they 
 should be pleased with her: and excitement had oiled her 
 discretion. She could not resist marshalling all her ac- 
 quirements at once for their inspection. 
 
 Mrs. Cloud suddenly pulled down Laura's glowing face 
 to her and kissed it. 
 
 "I can't help it. I'm nearly bursting." Laura an- 
 swered her apologetically, though she had said nothing at 
 all. And then, with a rush, "Oh, Mrs. Cloud, you are a 
 dear!" They perfectly understood each other. 
 
 But Justin stared at them and disapproved. It was so 
 unlike his mother to be demonstrative . . . and he wished 
 Laura would sit down and read. . . . She talked too much. 
 
 She did at last, as the dusk fell and they left the high 
 lands behind them, settle down to the dear, blameless Eng- 
 lish magazines, but not before she had had him thoroughly 
 on edge. 
 
 By the end of two days she was on edge herself. She 
 always remembered Milan as a series of spires and roofs, 
 up and down which she toiled after a Justin who never 
 waited for her, who always made his remarks just too far 
 off for her to hear what he said. And he hated repeating 
 himself. She did not know what had come to either of 
 them. They were always on the verge of perfect agreement 
 or a serious quarrel and nothing ever happened, except 
 that Justin had the bored look in his eyes that Laura 
 dreaded, and Laura had a lump in her throat all day long. 
 
 Yet sometimes Laura wondered if she imagined the whole 
 thing. Mrs. Cloud did not seem disturbed. Mrs. Cloud 
 drove with them in the mornings, and rested in the after- 
 noons, and listened to them in the evenings, and beamed at 
 them both as if she found life as pleasant as usual. And 
 she approved of Laura. Of that there was no doubt. It 
 was Mrs. Cloud who nodded congratulations when Laura, 
 on their first evening, in her first evening dress, swished 
 her way in and out of the dining-tables, very grown-up and 
 shy and uncomfortable. Mrs. Cloud would not have
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 97 
 
 changed Justin for a dozen Lauras, and yet, watching her 
 entry, quite alive to the heads that turned, and the murmur 
 at the nearer tables, she wished she had a beautiful young 
 daughter of her own of whom to be critically proud. 
 
 "Green's your colour!" said Mrs. Cloud, as Laura set- 
 tled herself. No more but it was the accolade. 
 
 Laura blushed and glanced at Justin. 
 
 ' ' Chianti or white wine ? " he enquired with some interest. 
 
 "No, thank you. Water, please." (. . . Men were 
 queer!) 
 
 "Oh, if you'd rather!" (. . . Odd things, women!) 
 
 It was the last straw when Art, the Italian jade, plucked 
 at Justin's sleeve, whispering that two were company . . . 
 and Justin went out to Pavia all by himself. Mrs. Cloud 
 had a headache. Laura, because she felt like it, spent her 
 afternoon at the Campo Santo, and, among tombs, made up 
 her mind to have it out with Justin. 
 
 She had a certain desperate directness in emergencies 
 that might easily have been mistaken for courage. She had 
 quite the average capacity of a woman for subterfuge, but, 
 linked with it, a curious dread of being spared in her 
 turn. She could face an ugly truth, but she could not 
 endure it tailored. She must know where she stood. She 
 must know where she stood with Justin, risking snubs; 
 though she dreaded being snubbed as only soft-shelled 
 youth can. She must know what she done wrong. She 
 was quite sure that, whatever it was, it was her fault, be- 
 cause if it were not her fault, it would be Justin's. . . . 
 And that was impossible. . . . She did not pretend to un- 
 derstand Justin, she knew she was not clever enough for 
 that, but at least she realized that he had no faults. . . . 
 She was not quite a fool. . . . There were certain inexpli- 
 cabilities, of course, but they were not her presumptuous 
 business. . . . 
 
 One does not criticize one's god, or only when one has 
 ceased to believe in him. But God is not God when one 
 ceases to believe in Him.
 
 98 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 She attacked Justin the next evening, choosing the 
 wrong moment, when he was tired, ready for a pipe and a 
 book rather than argument. But he had been kind to her 
 at dinner and she had made him laugh. (At least she could 
 always make him laugh.) She thought his mood could not 
 change in half an hour. 
 
 But it had changed. He was absorbed, if not somnolent : 
 had not a glance to spare as she hesitated in front of him. 
 
 "Justin? Aren't you coming out again?" 
 
 He shook his head. 
 
 She looked out of the window. The moon glimmered in 
 the white sky, thin and flat and unsubstantial, like a 
 peeled honesty leaf : and, below, the square was glamorous. 
 The cathedral that rose out of it, like June woods turned to 
 stone, quivered in the warm dusk as on the verge of dis- 
 enchantment. The dots of lamp-light increased like but- 
 tercups all opening at once, and among them people moved 
 in vague masses. A shrill of voices and laughter floated 
 upwards. 
 
 Laura turned to Justin, straining his eyes over Bae- 
 deker's Northern Italy. The sight of the crowd had 
 stirred her, made her want to go down into it, just as the 
 sight of the sea makes you want to bathe. 
 
 "It's only half -past eight," she hazarded. 
 
 He read on. 
 
 She glanced across at Mrs. Cloud, half asleep at the 
 other end of the huge deserted hotel sitting-room. They 
 were the only people indoors on that warm spring night of 
 Italy. 
 
 Suddenly she attacked him 
 
 "Justin, you'll hurt your eyes." Then, with a curtness 
 that was pure embarrassment, ' ' Justin, what 's the matter ? ' ' 
 
 "The matter?" He raised his eyebrows. 
 
 ' ' Yes. I want to know. ' ' She hesitated. ' ' Is anything 
 wrong? Have I done anything you don't like? What 
 makes you ?'"
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 99 
 
 "What?" 
 
 "Oh, I don't know so funny to me. So grumpy." 
 
 "I'm sorry. I didn't know " he began stiffly. 
 
 She flared out. 
 
 "Of course you know. It's been perfectly awful. You 
 sit on me and sit on me and go out by yourself and 
 fidget at meals when I talk " 
 
 "I say, don't wake Mother," he warned her. 
 
 Hastily she dropped an octave. 
 
 "So I think you might tell me what's the matter," she 
 concluded. 
 
 "Oh rot, Laura," said Justin uncomfortably. "What 
 should be the matter?" 
 
 He waited a moment for her answer ; but she said noth- 
 ing: was waiting in her turn. He looked at his book. 
 
 If he once began reading again . . . 
 
 "I don't know," she said hastily, "but there is. You 
 might tell me, Justin." She put her hand upon his open 
 book, would not budge as he tried politely to move it. 
 "You've got to tell me," she insisted. 
 
 It was a very young and ignorant thing to do, crudely 
 provocative if it had not been so utterly unconscious. A 
 woman or an older man would have laughed and under- 
 stood and found it charming enough. But it annoyed 
 Justin. He hated to be bothered. He had a keen sense 
 of his own dignity. Above all he had a horror of being 
 inveigled into anything approaching sentimentality. And 
 he was out of touch with Laura. He had been prepared for 
 a jolly little girl, not for a young woman with obvious faults 
 and disconcerting garments. He was just too old to label 
 her challenge 'cheek,' yet not old enough to make allow- 
 ances for her hobble-de-hoyhood, to differentiate between 
 impudence and a lack of savoir-faire. Ever since Lucerne 
 he had been, though he had no idea of analysing his atti- 
 tude, disappointed, on the edge of boredom. He was as 
 unaware as she herself of the beauty of her hand, he
 
 100 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 merely knew that he didn't want a great paw sprawling 
 over his book. He wanted to say "Get out!" And she 
 stood there and waited ! 
 
 He leaned back in his chair with elaborate indifference. 
 
 "Justin!" 
 
 She was actually smiling at him pleased, he supposed, 
 with the success of her idiotic performance. 
 
 "I don't know that it's anything much," he was im- 
 pelled to begin. "It doesn't matter anyway. It's 
 only ' ' He broke off. 
 
 ' ' Tell me, ' ' she insisted. And again he disliked her tone. 
 Who was she to order him about? Oh, well, if she wanted 
 it she should have it. ... 
 
 "You're rather different from what I expected." He 
 stopped. It was not perfectly easy, annoyed as he was. 
 
 "How?" 
 
 "Oh, I don't know." 
 
 "How?" She had a touch of colour in her cheek. Her 
 bright eyes compelled him. 
 
 "You're rather French, you know. You don't seem 
 quite natural. ' ' 
 
 "How?" 
 
 "Well, your clothes " 
 
 Her face fell. 
 
 ' ' Oh, Justin, don 't you like them ? ' ' 
 
 "They're rather bright." 
 
 "Oh!" 
 
 He did not volunteer anything. 
 
 "What else, Justin?" 
 
 "Oh, how do I know?" He was impatient. "It's not 
 my business. But I hate scent and chatter and high heels 
 and things that jingle. And you come down to dinner 
 with your hair fussed out like an actress. But it's all 
 right, I expect." 
 
 "I see." She managed to smile at him before she 
 swished across to the window, with the little un-English 
 swing of her body that was another of her ways that
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 101 
 
 vaguely irritated him. He made an impatient movement. 
 Of course he didn't want to hurt her feelings, but why on 
 earth did she worry him? 
 
 ' ' I only mean You wouldn 't see Mother Every 
 
 one looks at you ! ' ' And then, " I 'm sorry, Laura, but you 
 made me say what I think. ' ' 
 
 "Of course. I'm glad. I'm glad to know what you 
 think." 
 
 Her voice grew higher and higher as she tried to over- 
 top the catch in it. He had put a match to her quick 
 young pride, and it blazed and raged within her till she 
 was quite sick with the physical pain of it. The intoler- 
 able, humiliating tears rose under her lids. Always with 
 her back to him she took her handkerchief, screwed it to 
 a point, and removed them with precise care. She could 
 not quite control them, the square danced mistily, but at 
 least she would not show a stained face. Head up before 
 everything ! 
 
 'Not natural,' 'like an actress.'. . . Oh, it wasn't fair 
 of Justin . . . wasn't fair not to give her time to get used 
 to him again. . . . He'd been grown-up so much longer, 
 but didn 't he remember what it felt like to be shy and awk- 
 ward and uncertain? . . . How could one cover it up but 
 by being glib? ... At Paris they liked her. . . . Mrs. 
 Cloud liked her. . . . Mrs. Cloud had liked her green dress. 
 . . . She didn't know what he meant. ... It wasn't 
 vanity, everybody waved their hair. . . . She couldn't 
 help her voice being loud. . . . She had never realized that 
 she was so full of faults. . . . She had only wanted to 
 make herself nice and now it was all wrong. . . . And 
 after looking forward so to Italy. . . . Not that she cared 
 . . . not that she cared a hang ! . . . 
 
 ' ' Don 't worry, Laura ! ' ' Justin was stirred by a vague 
 compunction, though he wished that she did not find it 
 necessary to stand between him and the last of the light. 
 "What does it matter? I told you it's nothing to do with 
 me."
 
 102 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 She whirled round indignantly, all eyes and flame. 
 
 "Whom else has it got to do with but you and Mrs. 
 Cloud and Gran 'papa? If you feel that way I've got to 
 alter things. It's dreadful! It's dreadful that you don't 
 like me any more." 
 
 He was obliged to smile at that a smile that lit up his 
 face as sunshine brightens a room: and suddenly, for the 
 first time since their meeting, he was at home with her 
 again. The simplicity of her passionate distress was so 
 familiar, so entirely the Laura he had missed, that the two 
 alienating years were blotted out, as the darkness was blot- 
 ting out Laura's skirts and offending airs and graces, 
 leaving him his foundling again in one of her tragi-comic 
 rages, his rum old Laura, raw from conflict with life and 
 Aunt Adela. 
 
 She must be smoothed down! . . . She must be 
 smoothed down at once! . . . 
 
 "Here, dry up, Laura," he advised her, "and don't talk 
 so much. You're right, it's getting too dark to read. 
 Come on out with me and eat spaghetti on the pavement. 
 They say that's the thing to do when there's a moon." 
 
 For an open-mouthed moment she stared at him: then, 
 with a comprehension of his change of attitude that was 
 uncanny, controlled herself, controlled her choking need of 
 a good cry, nodded cheerfully, and ran upstairs for her 
 hat, her old straw hat at the bottom of her trunk that she 
 had not meant to wear in Italy. 
 
 It was going to be all right. . . . He was going to under- 
 stand. . . . He was going to be himself again ... if she 
 only kept quiet and wore her old clothes . . . Oh, all ye 
 works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord! . . . She dashed 
 downstairs. 
 
 It was a cloudless night. The macaroni was delicious. 
 The clang of the trams was like Eastern music. Laura 
 was quiet and sweet. Justin found that he was enjoying 
 himself, and was moved to tell all about his tour around 
 the world, and she was deeply interested and asked extraor-
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 103 
 
 dinarily intelligent questions, and there was no shadow 
 upon them any more, save the shadow of the great cathedral, 
 black and white and wonderful under the moon. 
 
 It was late when they came back to an amused, forsaken 
 Mrs. Cloud, and were eloquent for half an hour upon moon- 
 light and macaroni and Milan. 
 
 And Justin said good-night to Laura and shook hands 
 with her properly instead of grunting off to bed as he 
 generally did. He said she was to sleep well. She said 
 she would. 
 
 Yet the dawn a few hours later, nosing damply in be- 
 tween Venetian blinds, surprised Laura, with wet brushes 
 and a determined mouth, still hard at work before her 
 looking-glass, brushing, brushing, brushing the vanity out 
 of her splendid hair.
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 
 MAN generalizes, woman defines. 
 
 Woman she will nurse Tom through small-pox, flirt 
 outrageously with Dick, and sell her soul for Harry and 
 enjoy doing it; but refer to them, Tom, Dick and Harry, 
 with collective benevolence as 'humanity,' and she yawns. 
 She is not an altruist. She does not love in the lump. 
 She lives her seventy odd years for the sake of how many 
 people? There would be a question for her fellow-man! 
 If he whittle down the tally of his dear folk, his allies, his 
 indispensables, just at which notch will his knife blunt, will 
 his hand shake and refuse service ? How many loves could 
 he deny to save how many? But you cannot imagine 
 woman discomposed by such a problem. 
 
 He and she sit over the fire she has built, and she listens 
 with breathless interest to his schemes for the betterment 
 of the world, while the rest of its inhabitants drift in and 
 out of her indifferent ken like the snow-flakes' indistin- 
 guishable millions drifting past her window-panes. Yet 
 this indifference is less selfishness than an armour assumed. 
 Like any hermit crab she must borrow a shell for her ex- 
 cursions because she knows herself a soft-bodied creature, 
 impressed so easily by all the other people of the world 
 who, she asserts passionately, never can or shall impress 
 her. She is, nevertheless, vaguely enlightened when she re- 
 turns, changed a little in spite of herself, her armour 
 dinted, taught at least where it was weakest, if her fellow- 
 man acclaim the improvement. Then there was, after all, 
 she supposes, if she be eighteen and Laura, some use in all 
 those other people who did not interest her . . . educa- 
 tional. . . . That, looking back might have been the use 
 and excuse for Oliver Seton. He had certainly taught 
 
 104
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 105 
 
 her a lesson or two for which she had been anything but 
 grateful at the time. A stupid man. . . . She could still 
 go pink, years later, when she thought, as she seldom did, 
 of him and his stupidity. Poor Oliver! 
 
 From the first she was prejudiced against him. The 
 travelling companions had been in Florence ten soft blue 
 days, and Florence, with her palaces and wistaria and 
 agate-coloured river, welcomed them, was kind, almost as 
 kind as Mrs. Cloud, whose thrice-blessed headaches came 
 on regularly every other day or so at nine in the morning, 
 and were always over by tea-time. You might almost 
 imagine that Florence and Mrs. Cloud, those two beautiful 
 old women, had talked things over. 
 
 ''Delighted, my dear! Just you leave them to me. 
 You'll stay at home, of course?" 
 
 "I suppose I'd better " 
 
 "Young folk, my dear!" 
 
 "Oh, I do so like to hear them talking," says Mrs. 
 Cloud wistfully. 
 
 "So do I always did. I remember listening, just such 
 a spring as this it was the almonds blossomed early and 
 ' Sandro, ' she says, like a bird ' Sandro ! ' and throws a 
 tulip to him over the garden wall. You know my little 
 wild tulips?" 
 
 Mrs. Cloud knows them. 
 
 "Dear, dear, how it brings things back! But I shut 
 all my eyes. Two was company even then. Why, you 
 yourself, only yesterday " 
 
 Mrs. Cloud has such a pretty laugh. 
 
 "He brought you an armful of those very same tulips 
 my tulips. Do you remember?" 
 
 "I remember " says Mrs. Cloud. 
 
 Justin and Laura, of course, were no match for those 
 conspirators, Florence and Mrs. Cloud and Mrs. Cloud's 
 headaches; though Justin was all anxiety and eau-de- 
 cologne, and Laura was sure she ought to stay at home as 
 nurse. It appeared, however, that what Mrs. Cloud
 
 106 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 needed was Absolute Quiet and I am afraid that when 
 the novelty wore off Absolute Quiet was her portion, for 
 Florence more than kept her promises, and, as Justin said, 
 he didn't want his mother to overtire herself. Of course it 
 was the travelling because she never used to have these 
 headaches. 
 
 Dear Mrs. Cloud ! If ever there were a woman without 
 
 guile And yet, you know, I cannot quite believe in 
 
 Mrs. Cloud's headaches. 
 
 But Justin and Laura believed in them implicitly, and 
 brought her back menthol and aspirin from the English 
 chemist's, and, that she might know what they had 
 been doing, all the fat little catalogues that Justin carried, 
 as it were card-cases, when he paid his calls upon 
 Florence. 
 
 For Justin was never happy without a catalogue. It 
 annoyed him sometimes that Laura had such a trick of pro- 
 nouncing upon pictures without looking at the labels first. 
 She had stood him out once that Sandro's Simonetta was 
 nevertheless by some one else who it was she did not care, 
 and she never remembered names. He looked it up and 
 proved her wrong, and then, you know, she turned out to be 
 right after all one of those unsettling footnotes. "Then 
 why have it labelled ' Botticelli ' ? " he demanded, and Laura 
 laughed. What did it matter as long as the picture were 
 there? But it worried Justin. He liked things done 
 decently and in order. Laura's irreverences upset him. 
 And yet, one morning, when Mrs. Cloud's headache was 
 more genuine than usual and Laura did stay behind, he 
 found Florence dull, as dull as the world when he had 
 travelled round it. He came home to lunch inclined to 
 think that they might as well be moving on what about 
 Verona? It took an afternoon's prowl in back streets, 
 two arguments with Laura, and a sixteenth-century cabi- 
 net, an absolute find dirt cheap the very thing for his 
 eggs completely to restore him. 
 
 But you can understand, if you are ever to understand
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 107 
 
 Laura at all, how deliriously beneath her sedateness she 
 was enjoying herself : can guess at her dismay when Justin 
 addressed her one morning 
 
 ' ' I say ! 'member Oliver ? ' ' 
 
 "Oliver? Oliver?" She frowned uncertainly. The 
 name was as familiar as the pink clouds of almond blossom 
 in the courtyard below, that reminded her every day of the 
 tree under Justin's window-seat. You could reach out and 
 pull in a twig to sniff as you read Justin's books . . . the 
 Rackhams the Arabian Nights. Oh, of course. . . . 
 
 "You mean to say you don't remember Oliver?" Justin 
 was opening his eyes widely at her over the letter he was 
 reading. He always opened his eyes where most people 
 would lift an eyebrow, which gave his simplest question an 
 air of reproachful surprise that put you quite unneces- 
 sarily on the defensive. If you didn't know the answer 
 you felt guilty. But Laura was able to run back across 
 the years to Justin with a laugh. 
 
 "Does he is he the one that will call you Camaralza- 
 man?" 
 
 Justin laughed too. 
 
 "Rum kid you were. Yes. He always enquires after 
 the harem. He won't know you again." 
 
 Laura's eyebrows were under no disabilities. 
 
 "Oh, because he's here," he answered them. "This 
 letter's been trotting after me for weeks. Wish I'd known. 
 We might have been bummelling about together all this 
 time," he concluded regretfully. 
 
 "So we might ! ' ' Her tone matched his to a nicety. 
 
 "We must look him up first thing. Mother, you've got 
 to come. You remember Oliver? It's funny we've not 
 run into him. He's copying at the Uffizi." 
 
 "Oh! He paints!" Laura ruffled up into the com- 
 ically aggressive interest that an artist or a gamecock or 
 a pretty woman will always display when a fellow pro- 
 fessional is mentioned. "Is he any good?" 
 
 " 'Is he any good!' " Justin ruffled in his turn. He
 
 108 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 was always easily moved on behalf of his dearest friend 
 of the hour and he had your plain man's instinctive and 
 unbounded admiration for the creative gift. He had also 
 his nai've conviction that its obverse, the critical faculty, 
 must nevertheless be in himself. "Of course, I don't pre- 
 tend to know anything about painting," Justin would pre- 
 pare you, "but I know what I like, you know!" But thus 
 guided he was certainly safer than most, for he had an 
 enviable habit of liking the right things. It was as if he 
 proved all art with the touchstone of his own unconscious 
 honesty. Now Laura could not help persuading herself to 
 like what Justin liked because Justin liked it. She had 
 resigned herself to admiring Oliver, though she was sure 
 that she never should, before Justin had finished, his 
 eulogy. 
 
 "Whom is he under?" she demanded. 
 
 "Oh, he's on his own now, of course. I tell you he's a 
 big pot. He was at the Slade though, I believe." 
 
 "Oh? Oh, I knew some Slade people in Paris." And 
 then, because she could not help it ' ' Their paint 's awfully 
 muddy. ' ' 
 
 Justin was deep in his letter again, but he came to the 
 surface for a moment to say paternally 
 
 "Oh, of course! You sketch yourself a bit, don't you? 
 You must get him to give you some tips. ' ' 
 
 And she with a letter in her pocket at that moment, 
 a cordial letter, an almost anxiously enquiring letter, from 
 Monsieur La Motte ! But naturally, or, if you were a man, 
 oddly enough, it was not Justin but Oliver Seton whom she 
 wanted to shake. 
 
 "Is he really nice ? Did you like him ? ' ' she asked Mrs. 
 Cloud when Justin had left the room. He never sat out 
 other people's breakfast. 
 
 Mrs. Cloud wore her quaintly unhappy look. She dis- 
 liked discussing any one whom she could not whole-heart- 
 edly praise. But Laura had a way of dragging Mrs. 
 Cloud's opinions out of her that Mrs. Cloud, always re-
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 109 
 
 sisting, nevertheless enjoyed almost as much as she en- 
 joyed her son's invariable assumption that they must be 
 the same as his own. 
 
 ' ' He 's a very clever young man. And we must be pleas- 
 ant to him, Laura, for Justin's sake." 
 
 "Ah, I thought you didn't," said Laura, with satisfac- 
 tion. ' ' Now what exactly is it conceit ? ' ' 
 
 But Mrs. Cloud said that Laura must finish her coffee, 
 because the poor waiter was obviously wanting to clear 
 away. 
 
 Now it must be confessed that if Mrs. Cloud and Laura 
 shared a prejudice against that rising young artist, Oliver 
 Weathersby Seton, the fault was as little theirs as his. 
 Mrs. Cloud could have forgiven the inconsequence of his 
 manner (she was not to know that he was 'Weathercock 
 Seton' to his intimates), and Laura would have admitted 
 that her memory of a long boy who laughed at her and 
 talked with his hands was pleasant enough, if Justin, in the 
 openness of his heart, had not held forth quite so ener- 
 getically upon his tempermental friend. Oliver was so 
 brilliant, so impulsive, so affectionate, the quaintest of 
 companions, the jolliest of merry-andrews ! Justin could 
 not help admiring a character so different from his own in 
 pace if not in quality: and the more he dwelt upon it, the 
 more deeply interested in his own admiration he grew, 
 until he worked himself up in the course of the morning 
 from a moderate sense of friendship to a state of enthusi- 
 asm as gratifying to himself for his temperate nature 
 enjoyed a rousing as it was depressing to his women- 
 folk. There is no doubt that excessive praise of other peo- 
 ple is hard to bear. 
 
 There was time enough, however, while they lost them- 
 selves and each other in the honeycomb of the Uffizi, and 
 met again unexpectedly as they hunted down Oliver, for 
 Laura to be firm with herself, to scout this ridiculous 
 notion of sticking up her chin at him. Mrs. Cloud was 
 right. ... Of course she must make herself perfectly
 
 110 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 charming to Justin's friend . . . because, though she was 
 certain to disapprove of him, it was absolutely necessary 
 that he should approve of her. . . . Suppose he didn't like 
 her . . . said sneery things about her to Justin! . . . 
 Justin was so easily influenced. . . . Was he? She pulled 
 herself up short. Was he ? She had never thought of that 
 before. Yet here she was taking it for granted! . . . And 
 it was perfectly true. ... He was as hard as nails . . . 
 you could not persuade him to anything face to face . . . 
 but you could drop a notion into his ear, and in a week 
 it would leaven the lump of him. . . . She knew it. She 
 had always known it. She wondered how she knew? 
 
 She trailed out of that room (she had lost the Clouds 
 again) to find herself in a long remote corridor that she 
 had not seen before. In a corner to her right a man stood 
 and painted. 
 
 Was this Oliver? She could not see his face, but she 
 thought it probable. He was young, and though his 
 clothes were Latin Quarter French, he wore them like an 
 Englishman, an Englishman pretending that he was not 
 in fancy dress. 
 
 She drew nearer. She was herself too hardened to an 
 audience to be chary of watching him, but she was amused 
 and faintly contemptuous when she saw how instantly he 
 was embarrassed. He had been absorbed in his work, his 
 good work, as she critically admitted. Justin was right 
 the man could paint. She had never seen a better copy, 
 unless, indeed, it had too vigorous a life of its own. She 
 sympathized. This was no commission. She guessed him 
 a penitent, at her own trick of subduing the artistic flesh. 
 She observed that he had pet brushes. If this were Oliver, 
 she might like him after all. . . . 
 
 And then, as I told you, he became aware of her, and 
 began, like any child, to show off. He did not turn: he 
 remained elaborately unconscious; but he intensified him- 
 self. She could not help laughing. The breathless pause, 
 the poised brush, the accurate dab, the hasty retreat and
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 111 
 
 long absorbed stare, the frantic rattle through his paint- 
 box for the unnecessary tube, it was all familiar comedy: 
 she had played it herself in her first nervous week at the 
 Louvre. But he, at twenty-five if he were Oliver he must 
 be quite twenty-five could not possibly be nervous any 
 more. ... It was pose, pure pose, very funny to watch. 
 ... So that was Oliver ! She shrugged her shoulders and 
 strolled on. 
 
 She would, perhaps, have had her expressive mouth more 
 under control had she realized that a dark canvas and a 
 sheet of glass are an excellent substitute for a mirror. 
 
 She glanced at her watch. She and Justin had their 
 established rendezvous, but it was early yet. If this were 
 Oliver, Justin and his mother would find him sooner or 
 later. ... It would have saved time if Oliver had had 
 the sense to say what he was copying. . . . Justin, with an 
 indulgent smile, had said that the omission was just like 
 Oliver "Head in the clouds as usual. You know what 
 these geniuses are." Genius! . . . What would Justin 
 have said if any one else had sent them trapesing up and 
 down these endless rooms? She, Laura, did not mind for 
 herself, of course, but poor Mrs. Cloud would be done up. 
 . . . Even she was not sorry to rest for a moment. . . . 
 
 She sat down thankfully on a student's deserted stool. 
 It was a warm, lax day and she was, in truth, a little dazed 
 and overborne by the bright colours and echoing rooms and 
 the familiar, indescribable odour that is the breath of 
 painted pictures, crowded hundreds of pictures, hundreds 
 of years old. She had only to shut her eyes to be in Paris 
 ... in her painting apron. . . . 
 
 She shut them. 
 
 She did not actually drowse. She was aware of the dis- 
 comfort of her hard seat, of herself perched stiffly upon it, 
 and of the eternal, far-away confusion of footsteps that 
 ticked and tapped and clattered as if the great building 
 were the home of all the timepieces in the world; but she 
 was indifferent, bound by that pleasant, trancelike numb-
 
 112 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 ness that will overtake you sometimes in church, or in the 
 corner seat of an express. Not an inch of her wanted to 
 stir again : she would murder any one who disturbed her in 
 the next hundred years, if murder were not so energetic 
 a business. Her mind dwelt with infinite contentment on 
 a memory it had preserved of a donor's robe that had 
 caught her eye, shining out of some dreary acre of canvas 
 like a geranium in a slum window. The colour made her 
 purr as she thought of it. The sun, who never waited for 
 the blinds '-man to finish his lunch, had arrived at the un- 
 protected window behind her, and was kissing the back of 
 her neck. She was as contented as a cat, and it was 
 unforgivable of some one, some brawler at the other end 
 of the world, to knock over a paint-box and scrape back 
 a stool and come tearing past her like a wind, shouting 
 
 "Here! Hi! Here, I say! Cloud! Justin, old man! 
 Well now, isn't this jolly?" 
 
 She opened her eyes and rubbed them crossly, as a child 
 does when a you rouse it too suddenly from sleep. What 
 was the fuss now? Oh, there were the Clouds at last . . . 
 and the man her eyes sulked up the room to where the 
 painter had been standing then the man was Oliver. . . . 
 
 What an unnecessary noise he was making! . . . And 
 that was the third time he had shaken hands with Justin 
 . . . both hands ... So affected. . . . His hair was too 
 thin to wear fluffed out, just like all the little students. 
 . . . Now he was shaking hands again ! . . . She wondered 
 that Justin stood it. But Justin was looking so 
 pleased. . . . 
 
 She did not go up to them. She sat still on her stool and 
 watched with a disapproval that grew like a beanstalk. 
 He, Oliver, was handsome, she supposed, if you admired the 
 type that cried out for gold ear-rings and a razor. . . . 
 She didn't . . . The man wasn't still a moment. . . . He 
 talked with his whole body. . . . She could hear scraps: 
 
 "My dearest fellow Well, I was going on, but now 
 
 you've some Piece of luck Tell you what old
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 113 
 
 man Oh, my dear soul " One of these Italianate, 
 
 epithetical people. . . . She knew she shouldn 't get on with 
 him. . . . She wondered how much longer Justin would be 
 content to stand there, beaming and button-holed. 
 
 And then Mrs. Cloud caught sight of her, and this Oliver 
 person had given her a quick amused look and said some- 
 thing to Justin as they all moved up the gallery towards 
 her and she came down to them. 
 
 There were introductions. Oliver gave her the pro- 
 longed and peculiarly earnest handshake which implied 
 that his whole eager nature leaped to welcome the friend 
 of his friend, and turning back to Justin instantly forgot 
 all about her. He exhibited his copy to them, and told 
 them how good it was, and what a great many people whom 
 they did not know had said about it. His vanity was so 
 fresh and real, so unadulterated by false modesty, that 
 Laura should have humoured him. But she was too young, 
 I suppose, to find it charming. It is curious how intolerant 
 youth always remains of that youthfullest of sins. She 
 listened, however, with merciless attention, as he talked 
 them out of the gallery and down the staircase and along 
 the street to a restaurant. When they all sat down to- 
 gether to lunch he was still talking, and Mrs. Cloud had 
 said but half-a-dozen words and Laura not one. 
 
 It was not until the meal was nearly over that he became 
 aware, with the uncanny sensitiveness of the egoist, that 
 his circle was incomplete, that some one, somewhere, was 
 not fully appreciating him. It could not be Mrs. Cloud 
 . . . because he openly adored Mrs. Cloud, and had al- 
 ways been grievous that she would not let him paint her. 
 . . . (How should he dream, when admiringly he had tried 
 to tease her into consent, that the pretty faint colour in 
 her cheek was not a flush of pleasure, that Mrs. Cloud was 
 one of those rare women who honestly believe themselves 
 to be plain.) He did not quite understand her, he ad- 
 mitted ; but he knew he was a favourite, because she always 
 welcomed him so kindly. ... It could not be Mrs. Cloud
 
 114 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 who was obstructing Mm. . . . Remained the girl with the 
 red hair, and, as she lifted them, the eyes. . . . 
 
 At once he turned to her with that intimate abruptness, 
 that serene assumption of her interest in him that was, 
 Laura began to understand, his chief Charm for Justin, 
 who always needed helping over his preliminaries. Justin, 
 she observed through her lashes, waited, smiling, for her 
 answer, sure that she, too, must be finding this Oliver 
 irresistible. It would certainly have soothed her to 
 realize that he was anticipating with equal satisfaction her 
 own effect upon Oliver ; but she never dreamed that he was 
 proud of her. How should she, when he did not know it 
 himself? Yet he must have been, for he found himself 
 distinctly irritated when he heard Laura tell Oliver that 
 she thought Florence was very nice. He felt that she was 
 not doing herself justice. 
 
 ' ' Nice ! ! " Oliver rose like a trout to that fly. 
 
 "Don't you?" Laura looked surprised. 
 
 He drew eloquent breath. 
 
 " 'Nice!' Dear lady, we're speaking of Florence 
 Buondelmonte's Florence Dante's Florence Fiorenza, 
 
 dentro dalla cerchia antica Don 't you realize ? They 
 
 walked and talked out in that square. From where we 
 sit we can see Savonarola burn. This isn't a town. It's 
 Florence, watering her flowers with heart's blood these 
 thousand years." 
 
 "That's right, old man," Justin encouraged him. 
 
 "But it's a nice place now, don't you think?" said 
 Laura. 
 
 Mrs. Cloud drank some coffee hurriedly. 
 
 "And I never dreamed the shops would be so good. 
 Ripping hats!" Laura's candid eyes assured Oliver how 
 pleased she was to join with him in praising Florence. 
 
 But Justin protested: he felt that Laura was being un- 
 usual. He had never seen her in such mood before, and he 
 didn't like it. 
 
 "Laura, you've not been in once since we came!"
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 115 
 
 "Oh, but I've wanted to." She answered him with the 
 smile and the look that was his due : and then, ' ' There 's a 
 hat in that street where we got the cabinet with thistles 
 on it a dream " 
 
 The change of tone as she spoke to him was too subtle 
 for Justin's ear; but Oliver looked across at her with sud- 
 den curiosity. 
 
 "Why why " he began. 
 
 "Florence even provides for donkeys, doesn't she, Mr. 
 Seton?" Laura nodded to him with the ingenuous, air 
 that he was beginning to suspect. But Justin interrupted. 
 
 "I think," he meditated paternally, "it's rather rot for 
 you to go mistering Oliver. He knew you when you were a 
 kid isn't it, Mother?" He turned to Mrs. Cloud and so 
 missed Laura's frown. 
 
 But Oliver was quicker. 
 
 "I say, Justin!" he exclaimed, "she doesn't want to. 
 She doesn 't like me. Quick ! Look at her ! Did you ever 
 see anything so hostile?" 
 
 Justin turned to the inspection. And Laura, naturally, 
 grew scarlet. She was furious. It was so perfectly true. 
 . . . She couldn't bear the man. ... A type she detested. 
 ... a caricature of herself. . . . But if she didn't like 
 him, it was no business of his to find it out. ... It was 
 cheek to challenge her in that way ... to make her look 
 a fool. . . . She wouldn't stand it. ... 
 
 Here Oliver, watching her delightedly, fanned the flame. 
 
 "There the colour d'you see? Now isn't that inter- 
 esting? Because everybody likes me, don't they, Justin? 
 don't they, Mrs. Cloud? And now, I remember, you 
 sniffed at my stuff this morning. I saw you in the glass. 
 Now why, Miss Valentine, now why?" 
 
 "Oh, what nonsense!" That, of course, is what she 
 should have said. That, she knew perfectly well, is what 
 she should have said. But the politenesses had gone from 
 her. She answered like the furious child she was. 
 
 "You pose," said Miss Valentine.
 
 116 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 "I swear I don't!" Oliver sat up. 
 
 "I say, Laura!" Justin warned her. 
 
 "He does, Justin. I watched him before you came. Oh, 
 you know you do." She faced Oliver accusingly. "You 
 were varnishing : you didn 't want all that gamboge. Now, 
 did you?" 
 
 Suddenly Oliver, who was sweet-tempered, began to 
 laugh guiltily. 
 
 "I believe she's right! Justin I believe she's right!" 
 
 "Yes and knocking over your easel to look excited, 
 and " she thought she might as well be hung for a sheep 
 as for a lamb ' ' and shaking hands four times running and 
 saying to me that I didn't like you like that. When 
 you're a little boy it's being enfant terrible and funny, but 
 when you're grown-up it's just pose." 
 
 "Now, look here Laura!" Oliver planted his elbows 
 squarely on the table. 
 
 "Yes Oliver!" She met his twinkling eyes stubbornly. 
 
 "If you please, what did you call Florence just now?" 
 
 "It is a very nice place," she defended herself. There 
 might or might not have been a dimpling of the austere 
 lines of her mouth. 
 
 "And you talked about hat-shops." 
 
 The dimple was unmistakable. There were even signs of 
 a second one. 
 
 ' ' You know what I 'm driving at ? " he insisted. 
 
 "Oh, yes," said Laura. 
 
 "Well, then wasn't it?" 
 
 "Wasn't it what?" said Justin. 
 
 She looked from one to another. 
 
 "Pose!" said Laura as meekly as you please.
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 
 I WONDER, Collaborator, if you are out of humour with 
 Laura? She has been, in the last chapter, a trifle 
 how shall we say? touchy ungracious narrow-hearted? 
 has shown herself a supercilious chit? 
 
 If you thought so, there was one person at least in entire 
 and most penitent agreement with you. Laura, at the eve- 
 ning ceremonial her mother had taught her, that she had 
 never foregone Laura, with her Bible and her good little 
 books, holding her day in review, had already used every 
 adjective that you offer me, over and over again, in a be- 
 wilderment at her own curmudgeonry that I, for one, find a 
 little laughable and still more pathetic. She had her 
 standards of conduct set up like ninepins, and when her 
 adolescence knocked them over, who so puzzled as Laura? 
 
 She read at random 
 
 A continual dropping on a very rainy day and a conten- 
 tious woman are alike. 
 
 "Ah!" thought Laura, heavily. 
 
 A gracious woman retaineth honour . . . like Mrs. 
 Cloud . . . grave and sweet, even when she didn't like the 
 Seton man a bit ... Now why couldn't she, Laura, have 
 behaved beautifully like that. . . . instead of saying what 
 she thought? . . . Yet wasn't it hypocritical not to say 
 what one thought? What a muddle it was! . . . But she 
 was sure she had been wrong, simply because she felt it in 
 her bones. When the moralities failed her she always 
 trusted to her bones. Ah, well, she must make up for it 
 tomorrow! . . . She could always make people like her if 
 she tried . . . and Mr. Seton had really been quite decent. 
 . . . He might have taken offence, and then Justin would 
 have been furious. . . . There was no reason but a Dr. 
 
 117
 
 118 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 Fell reason for disliking Oliver Seton, was there? Or was 
 there? . . . She went to sleep unsatisfied. 
 
 Yet, had she read on a page or two, she would have 
 found her answer, the answer written for her three thou- 
 sand years ago 
 
 Who is able to stand before jealousy f 
 
 If Solomon could not, with all his experience, isn't 
 there some slight excuse for Laura Valentine ? 
 
 But she was a good girl in the days that followed and 
 a baffling one to Oliver Seton, who had delightedly fore- 
 seen squally weather. He enjoyed quarrelling with a 
 pretty woman. But he soon agreed to agree with a dove- 
 like Laura, and so well that Justin was gratified. For it 
 had seemed to Justin, till she and Oliver between them 
 disturbed him, that Laura was already greatly improved. 
 His idea of a woman, in those dogmatical days, was the 
 ideal of Mr. Edmund Sparkler, and Laura, since the eve- 
 ning in Milan that appeared already far away, was daily 
 more completely fulfilling it. If she had been his favourite 
 armchair, at arm's length from his bookshelves and the 
 back to the light, she could not have suited him better. 
 And, appreciating her, he was pleased that his friend 
 should appreciate her also, and she his friend. He had 
 been worried by their first inimical encounter. Oliver he 
 knew for a weathercock; but Laura's opinions, negligible 
 as he felt them to be, had always their effect on him : had, 
 until he accounted for them, a singular and uneasy effect 
 upon him, as of undigested apples. That Laura, with no 
 nonsense about her, had seen fit to withdraw her objections, 
 was a real if unrealized relief. That Laura, chattering 
 nineteen to Oliver's dozen, with that ardent and enthusi- 
 astic young gentleman securely attached to her painting- 
 apron strings, should like him in her own private heart 
 no whit the better, simply could not occur to him. 
 
 But then there was so much that did not occur to Justin. 
 There is an incident in the lives of those two friends of his 
 of which he never dreamed ; though it took place in the very
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 119 
 
 shadow of his Roman nose ; though it rankled a long while, 
 quite three months, in Oliver's mind and to Laura was a 
 memory that could still make her ears burn when her 
 blushet days had grown as thin and unreal to her as the 
 pressed flowers in her Prayer Book on Sundays. 
 
 For Oliver, inevitably, as Justin ought to have known 
 he must, fell in love with Laura. They were always to- 
 gether. There is no doubt that even in winter his emotions 
 were easy, and here was spring herself waking daily in 
 Florence to wantoner life. He could not help feeling 
 poetical when the sun and the bees, and now and then 
 a butterfly, strayed in at the open doors of the galleries 
 and the churches and the monasteries where he and Justin 
 attended to the education of untravelled Laura Justin 
 olympically, Oliver with a growing conviction that she 
 could, if she chose, have taught them both. She was diffi- 
 dent Oliver wondered why but she could be surprised 
 into illuminating criticism, especially when Justin was out 
 of earshot, and Oliver, in this spring mood of his and as 
 impressionable as only the sea or an artist can be, was 
 quickly aware that she was good for him. Justin's tend- 
 ency was to classify, to lock doors, to enclose ; but she must 
 be ever querying, opening, opening up avenues. She scat- 
 tered questions like corn while they were garnering their 
 conclusions, and Oliver was amazed to find how constantly 
 those questions took root in him, sprouted into new 
 thoughts, fresh, sturdy, blossom-bearing. In short, she 
 stimulated him : set his fingers itching for his brushes. He 
 always worked better when he had a woman in his head. 
 
 He planned a picture of her. He was an impetuous per- 
 son, and he discovered in her profile and her fine meek lips 
 a resemblance to some perfectly amazing portrait of some 
 absolutely superb woman by that man who knocked every 
 other Florentine into a cocked hat what's his name? 
 Ghirlandaio. He was quite sure it was Ghirlandaio: re- 
 membered the picture: remembered its exact position on 
 the left hand wall of Lord ! didn 't Justin remember ?
 
 120 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 They spent a questing week scouring Florence for the 
 Ghirlandaio before Oliver remembered that it wasn't a 
 Ghirlandaio at all, but a Botticelli (it was a Botticelli 
 year for Oliver) and that it wasn't in Florence either, but 
 in London. 
 
 "A background, my dear chap! a background divine! 
 My word, what a blue! Like Shelley's blue dome! Like 
 Bellini 's doge the blackground, not the doge, you chump ! 
 Never seen it? My God, and you live an hour from 
 London ! ' ' 
 
 And then he had raked down Brogi's for a copy and 
 brought it to them in triumph. 
 
 ' ' I told you so ! There you are ! No, they 'd only got a 
 postcard. But if you imagine the colour" (followed the 
 blue doge), "it's the image. I've simply got to paint her. 
 My word, what a blind bat you are!" 
 
 But Justin sat and enjoyed him non-committally, as you 
 see a sleepy torn enjoying the permitted onslaughts of a 
 terrier pup. 
 
 "Can't you see it?" Oliver worried at him. He could 
 not be contented by acquiescence. He wanted enthusiasm. 
 "The twin the absolute twin! It only wants a slight 
 wave in her hair" (Laura glanced sidelong at Justin) 
 "to be a photograph!" 
 
 Justin, goaded into interest, stretched out a hand for the 
 photograph, examined and returned it. 
 
 "Don't see the faintest resemblance/' he pronounced. 
 
 Oliver's gesture implied that he would have torn his 
 hair if he could have afforded it. 
 
 "Do you?" said Justin to his Echo. 
 
 "No!" said Echo, through her nose, with a clear, con- 
 temptuous little laugh that nettled Oliver. 
 
 But he didn't guess how disappointed Echo was. Echo 
 would have been gratified if Justin had perceived that un- 
 doubtedly existing resemblance. As it was, she was merely 
 annoyed with Oliver for making the discovery. If Justin 
 didn't admire Laura's hair, it was certainly not Oliver's!
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 121 
 
 business to do so ... She didn't like Oliver. ... A 
 wordy man. . . . 
 
 But she was obliged to let him paint her. She had begun 
 by being deaf to his persuasions, for she knew what sitting 
 meant: she had always been the sacrifice of her merciless 
 mates in the Rue Honorine when the model had fainted or 
 left them in the lurch. But when Oliver appealed to 
 Justin, and Justin opened his eyes at her, what was she 
 to do? 
 
 Sit ? Of course she must sit ! It would be rather a lark. 
 They were in for a spell of rain and he was sick of churches. 
 He always enjoyed watching Oliver work, and besides, 
 Oliver was so awfully keen to paint her. He thought she 
 ought to be flattered. He would sit himself, like a shot, if 
 his mug were any use to Oliver. 
 
 And so she sat for them, in Oliver's big cool studio that 
 had been a palace pleasure-room once upon a time. The 
 rest of the building, even its name, had vanished out of 
 memory, but this one room still stood, fair and lofty as 
 Marina in the bagnio, amid the vile modern cubbies cluster- 
 ing against its three walls like barnacles upon a shell. The 
 fourth was all windows and a great glass door that opened 
 upon gardens. Its lintel was upheld by columns of pink- 
 ish stone, that writhed up in foliated spirals to a crazy 
 capital of fruits and rams' horns and ribands. In the 
 summer, said Oliver, the vine outside came clambering in 
 to put its tendrils and carved grapes to shame. The white- 
 washed walls were brilliant' with Oliver 's canvases, but on 
 the ceiling there were the flakes and peelings of a fresco, 
 still witnessing that it had once been lovely, as a skeleton 
 leaf cries out to you that once it was green. Laura, 
 perched on her throne, would try to decipher the dim out- 
 lines, till Oliver called to her not to pucker her face: and 
 then she would start and lose her pose and twinkle across 
 at Justin, while Oliver swore like a cat in Italian and 
 apologized mellifluously in English and arranged her again 
 to suit his difficult taste. I am afraid she was not a good
 
 122 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 sitter. She was still enough, but Oliver complained that 
 she would not look at him. He was certainly worth looking 
 at, as he sat in the open doorway, his dark face darker 
 against the light, and the overladen, fantastic column ris- 
 ing beside him. They had an odd air of belonging to the 
 same century. Justin, indeed, had once declared that 
 Oliver looked like an undissipated Medici; which did not 
 quite please Oliver. He was young enough to deprecate 
 the adjective. But despite his wild hair and dynamic 
 neckerchiefs and all the other inevitable little affectations 
 of his temperament and his trade, his good looks were un- 
 deniable, and it is possible that he did not often find his 
 sitters unappreciative. But always Laura's eyes went 
 through him and over him and beyond him to the 
 loggia where Justin lounged or read aloud to them in his 
 shy precise sing-song, while the smoke of his smouldering 
 pipe whorled upwards, to melt into the fine silvery rain 
 that eddied past like ghosts of old Florence, or to the cor- 
 ner where Justin raked his way through Oliver's stacked 
 canvases and grunted out comments that set Oliver ablaze. 
 And then Laura must jump down to see what it was all 
 about and give her opinion, though Oliver took no notice 
 of it, which nettled her, little as she liked him: and busi- 
 ness would be delayed. Mrs. Cloud would come in with a 
 basket and a Murillo's melon-boy to carry it, and they 
 would all picnic together on the throne. And afterwards, 
 if the sun had come out, Justin would carry them off 
 for a drive and no more painting would be done that 
 day. 
 
 Nevertheless the picture progressed apace. Mrs. Cloud 
 thought it very pretty and Justin was enthusiastic, though 
 not sufficiently enthusiastic for Oliver, for nobody's praise 
 seemed to Oliver to do his work quite such discriminating 
 justice as his own. Even Laura would have owned to a 
 real admiration if Oliver had asked her. But Oliver did 
 not ask her. Laura had protected Justin only too well. 
 He had explained to Oliver in all good faith how well she
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 123 
 
 sketched oh, water-colour, he supposed, he didn't really 
 know and Oliver, with all the water-colours of all the 
 daughters and drawing-rooms of England in his mind's 
 eye, thought himself wise in evading the subject. His 
 Hebe should not trip if he could help it. Naturally Laura 
 observed his manoeuvres. If she had had more faith in 
 herself she would have been amused by them ; as it was, she 
 was humanly annoyed. She might have made up her 
 mind to forgo her painting: she half believed she had; 
 but it was another thing to be ignored, to sit a week watch- 
 ing some one else handling and mishandling the tools of 
 your trade. Because, whatever conceit Oliver might have 
 of himself, he could not' draw. She could see all he did 
 reflected in the mirror beside him and he could not draw. 
 She conceded him colour, an amazing colour; but he had 
 no sense of discipline, of line . . . and, shades of Ingres! 
 how he was mangling the shoulder curve! However 
 this with a twist of her lip she supposed he would cover 
 it up nicely with drapery. 
 
 "Smile, please," directed Oliver. And then, "Sweeter, 
 my dear girl, sweeter. No, I don 't want your teeth. ' ' 
 
 "Oh, I can't sit any more," said Laura suddenly, and 
 she jumped down in spite of 'his outcries. "Aren't you 
 nearly done?" 
 
 "Pretty well." Oliver stepped back. "Like it?" he 
 enquired politely; but he went off to unpack the luncheon 
 basket without waiting for her answer. 
 
 Justin came up and looked over her shoulder. The can- 
 vas showed an arrangement of sunshine and white flesh and 
 red hair, with no more than a conventional resemblance to 
 Laura, but delicate and lovely as a bunch of shaded 
 nasturtiums. 
 
 "Don't you like it?" he asked. 
 
 She chose her words. 
 
 "It's wonderful colour: like a fire-opal." 
 
 He nodded quickly. She always found the words he 
 wanted.
 
 184 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 "That's why I've bought it at least, I'm going to 
 for Mother. Just the thing for the yellow parlour, isn't 
 it?" 
 
 "Oh, yes." She was pleased, tremendously pleased, that 
 she was to live in Mrs. Cloud's drawing-room. If they 
 hung her over the mantelpiece they would see her every 
 evening as they sat by the fire. . . . She thought not be- 
 cause it was she herself, of course, but because it was such 
 a good piece of work that it ought to go over the mantel- 
 piece. . . . 
 
 "Wouldn't you give your ears to draw like that?" 
 There was a wistfulness in Justin's voice that should have 
 touched her. He was thinking of himself, not of her. 
 
 But she, too, was thinking of herself. 
 
 "I can," said Laura absently. And then, as he laughed 
 "I tell you I can, Justin! I tell you I can!" 
 
 "Can what?" Oliver came across to them with his 
 hands full of fruit and green glasses and blue checked 
 table-cloth, and sat himself down to butter rolls. 
 
 "Draw," said Laura stiffly, her eyes on the fire-opal 
 shoulder blade. 
 
 ' ' Can you ? ' ' said Oliver in the soothing, interested voice 
 that one uses to a child. 
 
 "Well, you may laugh," she began, but ready to laugh 
 herself, if Justin, with a vague notion that she was making 
 herself look foolish and a still vaguer notion that he did 
 not like Laura to look foolish, had not interposed too 
 peremptorily 
 
 "Oh, dry up, Laura! Let's have lunch," and so set a 
 match to her discretion. 
 
 She flared. It was comical to hear the personal pique and 
 righteous artistic wrath struggling for precedence in her 
 harangue as she dragged out Oliver's spare easel. 
 
 "You eat your lunches! Oliver, where 's the michallet? 
 And charcoal? And a board? You two think you know 
 everything. You think I'm a fool. You think there's 
 nothing on earth but colour. Oh, I'll show you!" And
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 125 
 
 then, as the familiar delight of handling familiar tools 
 swept over her, she suddenly added, with complete if ab- 
 stracted friendliness, "Oliver keep him quiet, won't 
 you?" 
 
 "I'm hanged if you're going to immortalize me," be- 
 gan Justin. "Why not Oliver?" 
 
 "Know you better." She looked him up and down 
 through narrowed lids. "A little more round to the right, 
 please. Talk to him, Oliver." And she settled herself 
 to work. 
 
 Justin chuckled. But Oliver, watching her curiously, 
 noticing the businesslike deftness of her preparations, 
 turned, with a touch of discomfort, to Justin. 
 
 "I say I didn't know " And then, in an under- 
 tone, "Is she really any good?" 
 
 Justin held out his plate. 
 
 "I always told you she was keen. Cut us another slice. 
 I wish you were not quite so deaf," for Oliver's attention 
 had strayed back again to Laura. 
 
 But Laura stood and watched them while her hand 
 flashed and hesitated over her paper, with an air so im- 
 personal in its very intentness that in some fashion it re- 
 moved her from them, till at last they forgot her as one 
 forgets the caged presence of some bright-eyed, all-atten- 
 tive bird. They sat chatting together over their sand- 
 wiches, and, what with the sunshine and the tobacco smoke 
 and the midday stillness, grew at last so drowsy that Justin, 
 for one, jumped when Laura, with a despairing gesture 
 that sent the charcoal flying, abandoned her easel and came 
 to them across the room. 
 
 "Well?" Oliver roused himself. 
 
 Laura pushed aside her hair with the back of her black- 
 ened hand. She had managed in the last half-hour to 
 make herself more dishevelled than Oliver had ever seen 
 her. She was flushed to the eyes and she looked dead 
 tired. But he perceived that whatever spirit had possessed 
 her was departed.
 
 126 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 She answered, not him but Justin's eyes, with a shrug, 
 half deprecating, half defiant. 
 
 ' ' I 've done. I 'm afraid I 've messed up the floor, Oliver. 
 It's no good, of course. Of course I can't. Justin, I'm 
 a conceited ass. Any lunch left? I'm starving. It's 
 it's an awfully tiring day." She flung herself into a chair. 
 "Oliver, get me a glass." 
 
 But Oliver, who, with an air of amused curiosity, had 
 strolled across to the deserted easel, was staring from her 
 sketch to her, and from her to Justin, and so back again 
 to the sketch. Then he whistled a prolonged and pene- 
 trating whistle. 
 
 "Here, get up, Justin!" he commanded. "Let's have 
 a look at you." 
 
 Justin hauled himself out of his chair with a yawn and 
 stood to attention. Oliver looked at him, as Laura had 
 looked, through insolent, narrowed lids: indeed, for an 
 instant, there was the oddest likeness between them, dif- 
 ferent in type as they were. When at last he addressed 
 her, there was a new and intimate note in his voice 
 
 "I suppose you know what you've done?" 
 
 "I know what I've not done. I don't want butter, 
 Oliver, I want water. I 'm thirsty. ' ' 
 
 But he swept on excitedly as he went to fetch her a glass. 
 
 "Oh, you've justified yourself. I I'm half afraid of 
 you. How did you see all that ? I never saw all that " 
 
 "All what?" struck in Justin, as he considered himself 
 critically, his head on one side. "What are you driving 
 at? I think it's rather good." 
 
 Laura smiled at them both with her mouth full. 
 
 But Oliver continued to hold forth. His eyes danced. 
 He shook a warning forefinger. 
 
 "You '11 be a failure, yon know. This sort of thing won 't 
 get you into academies. What's the use of painting what 
 ought to be there? Eh ? People want to be photographed. 
 Ask Justin. Isn't that so, Justin?" 
 
 Laura flashed a dubious look at him. She was not quite
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 127 
 
 sure that she approved of the tone in which he said "Ask 
 Justin." Almost it seemed as if he implied superiority 
 a mutual acknowledgement of superiority to Justin . . . 
 Cheek! . . . 
 
 She waited for Justin to assert himself. But Justin was 
 absorbed in her drawing. 
 
 "It's quite good, isn't it?" he said to Oliver with an air 
 of gratified surprise. 
 
 "Oh, quite good." And this time the tone was so un- 
 mistakable that Laura reddened angrily. She got up 
 abruptly and joined them. 
 
 "Though I haven't got a nose like that. That I'll 
 swear." Justin rubbed the original thoughtfully. 
 
 Oliver grinned. 
 
 "No. That's Caesar's beak. But you could have if you 
 tried. Isn't that the idea, Laura? No work done, but 
 great works undone. You make her tear it up, Justin. It 
 isn 't fair. ' ' And then, as Laura made a movement to obey 
 him, "Here, what are you doing? This masterpiece is 
 my perquisite. ' ' 
 
 "Look here, Oliver, I won't have Laura ragged." 
 Justin had caught sight of her vexed face. "Don't you 
 worry, Laura. It isn't half bad for a beginner. Tons 
 better than I thought you could." 
 
 Oliver went off into one of his fits of laughter. 
 
 "Oh, Waring, what's to be really be?" he chanted. 
 "And the next article, please? I'm sorry, Justin. It's 
 Browning's split infinitive, not mine." 
 
 "Isn't he a fool?" demanded Justin, beaming at him. 
 
 "He's worse. He's a clever fool," said Laura darkly. 
 
 Oliver blew her a kiss.
 
 CHAPTER XVI 
 
 LAURA, in the days that followed, could not make up her 
 mind about Oliver : did not know what had come over him. 
 She had always intended him to like her, though there was 
 something in his temperament that must always prevent 
 her from heartily liking him in her turn, good friends as 
 they were; but she wished sometimes that he were less en- 
 thusiastic a champion. He was not satisfied with liking 
 her: he published her abroad. He paid attention to her 
 every trivial remark: she had known him to stop Justin 
 himself in the middle of a sentence to listen to what she 
 said. It was getting beyond a joke, you know. . . . And 
 ever since that unlucky morning in the studio, he had 
 raved about her work, calling heaven and earth and Justin 
 to observe as remarkable a talent as ever lay snug and 
 shameless in its napkin. 
 
 He worried at her, always before Justin, to tell him her 
 plans and when she said she had none, explained to her 
 with much picturesque detail exactly what she ought to 
 be doing for the next five years. The only effect of his 
 eloquence upon Laura was to intensify that inexplicable 
 sensation of panic that stole over her at the thought of 
 overleaping the gulf that daily yawned wider between her 
 and her art; but Justin seems to have listened with some 
 respect. At any rate, he had taken to arranging sketch- 
 ing expeditions for them. The plunge once taken, Laura 
 had been too weak to refuse. She had, after all, her paints, 
 an elbow length down her trunk. She had never been so 
 torn in her life as she now was between this definite cre- 
 ative instinct of hers and the other stronger instinct that 
 forbade it, the stronger instinct that she did not remotely 
 
 understand. 
 
 128
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 129 
 
 They would all drive out together to some nook of the 
 hills, and she and Oliver would be left to their devices 
 while Mrs. Cloud and Justin explored the village and 
 picked up curios and ordered lunch and came back at 
 last to see and criticize what they had done. One day 
 Justin startled her. He took her aside. 
 
 "I say, Laura," he began solemnly and she racked her 
 brains to remember if she had done anything wrong. "I 
 say you know if you want to go back to Paris to train 
 if you feel you've got it in you " 
 
 A future opened map-like in her mind, gorgeous, trium- 
 phant, like a bird's-eye view of an oriental city, hers, who 
 knew, for the conquering. And again that other, unknown 
 instinct was a mist that blotted it out. Through her 
 thoughts she heard him 
 
 "Of course I'm no judge, but Oliver says I've been 
 talking to Oliver and you know, Laura, you've only got 
 
 to tell me " (Mrs. Cloud would have liked to be there 
 
 just then to listen to Justin and love him. Any woman, 
 Laura herself, might have loved Justin then, he was so 
 portentous and fatherly) " because, you know, Laura, 
 if there's any difficulty your grandfather if you're wor- 
 ried about ways and means you know what I mean " 
 
 She flushed. 
 
 ""Well, you needn't, you know. It could be arranged. 
 I Mother Mother could fix it up for you." 
 
 Now did you ever hear of anything more kind? . . . He 
 had actually bothered his head . . . but that, you see, was 
 the sort of person Justin was. . . . She had always known, 
 of course, that he was not as other men, but wasn't it 
 kind? . . . She was almost reverently amazed at the 
 extraordinary, the unparallelled benevolence of this unique 
 Justin. She did not know how she was to thank him, be- 
 cause, when you tried, he always jerked away from you 
 like a pony. And yet it was indispensable to her peace of 
 mind that he should be most gratefully thanked. Thanked, 
 and at the same time convinced, beyond any possibility of
 
 130 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 argument, that she could not go back to Paris, that she 
 could not be an artist, that she did not care about painting 
 and that Oliver but it is not necessary for me to tell you 
 all that Laura refrained from saying about Oliver. Indeed 
 I have not the capacity. She was something of a specialist 
 in adjectives. 
 
 But she contrived, in the latter end, to settle things to 
 her satisfaction. Looking back she hardly knew how she 
 had done it ; for a young man, generously in love with his 
 own scheme for benefiting his neighbour, is apt to be ob- 
 stinate. Perhaps the fact that she was arguing, though 
 neither of them knew it, not with him but with her own 
 puzzled and protesting self, had something to do with her 
 success. She was bound to convince herself. 
 
 She said oh, she said that she had no real talent. 
 
 She said that Justin must realize by now what an exag- 
 gerated, unreliable er dear, Oliver was. 
 
 She said, with a sigh, that she only wished he were 
 right ; but that she had watched herself for two years now 
 
 She said that she had given up the idea altogether. 
 
 She said that her eyes weren't very strong. 
 
 She said that she was homesick. 
 
 She said that all that, however, did not lessen his kind- 
 ness, that she hadn't believed anybody could be so kind, 
 that it was quite impossible to thank him properly: and 
 then stopped, because she really did find it impossible. 
 
 She was perfectly sincere in every word she said, and 
 not once, not once did she remember the good offices of the 
 directresses and Monsieur La Motte. 
 
 There remained Oliver. She must set herself to the 
 danaid task of bottling-up Oliver. 
 
 She felt it to be a hopeless business. Convincing Justin 
 was like battering down a wall, laborious, but it could be 
 done; but convincing Oliver was like wrestling with run- 
 ning water. He did not resist you, he simply slipped 
 through your fingers. He had good manners: he waited 
 courteously while you expressed yourself; but he never
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 131 
 
 listened. Just as his eyes moved incessantly while he 
 talked to you, so you felt that his mind was, all the time, 
 eagerly working at what he meant to go on saying when 
 you had done. It was easier to send a boat up a torrent 
 than to lodge a thought of your own in that fluent, brim- 
 ming soul. 
 
 Perhaps she did not try hard, or if she did, for love 
 of the argument rather than the man. She was still young 
 enough to believe that argument is a kind of spy-glass into 
 a neighbour's mind instead of a cracked mirror that dis- 
 torts your own. Growing bored, she had lapsed into a 
 mere listener, except when he annoyed her. But he, find- 
 ing her passivity even more provocative than her temper, 
 could not leave her alone, and when she refused Justin's 
 proposals and he heard of it, fell upon her with enthusi- 
 astic indignation. 
 
 ' ' You know, I can 't make you out ! ' ' Oliver prided him- 
 self on understanding women. "What made you stuff up 
 Justin with all that rot? You're not a fool. You know 
 what you can do. 'No real talent !' "What are you driving 
 at ? That 's what I want to know. ' ' 
 
 Laura studied her morning's work. It was slight 
 enough. The sky was white, the hills were blue, and 
 cypresses pierced the all-pervading haze of the olive 
 groves; but Italy Italy was warm in every loving line 
 of it. She realized, as she looked at it, how nearly Oliver 
 was justified ; but her only answer was a queer little fleeting 
 smile. Sometimes it was difficult to resist Oliver. She 
 knew exactly how he felt. She believed that that was why 
 he annoyed her she saw in him all the tendencies she 
 tried to repress in herself. Here, but for the grace of 
 she hardly knew what went Laura Valentine! It made 
 her brusque with him and impatient, yet always, as I say, 
 with a queer accompanying smile that Oliver misinter- 
 preted. He misinterpreted it now. He thought she 
 wanted encouraging. He warmed to her.
 
 132 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 "My dear girl! You've got to believe in yourself. 
 One must. I do. People won't give you sixpences for 
 your stun* if you insist it's not worth tuppence and after 
 all, one's out for sixpences ! You've got to be sure of your- 
 self so sure that you never even think of it. I am. But 
 to sit there as you do and brood over whether you're any 
 good " 
 
 Again that queer smile came and went as Laura worked 
 and listened, and again it had its effect, its odd, exciting 
 effect upon Oliver. He felt generous, affectionate, ex- 
 pansive. He felt that he would do anything to help the 
 dear girl. . . . 
 
 "Should / be likely to back you up?" he demanded 
 "if I weren't sure? Haven't I wallowed in art students? 
 But you " he flung out dramatic hands "look at those 
 two things! Isn't your stuff up to mine? Of course! 
 And d'you know why? The technique excuse my saying 
 
 so " (the artist in him, the realest thing in him, was 
 
 coming out again) "the techinque is oh, unlawful! ut- 
 terly! but " his hand came down heavily on her shoul- 
 der "Oh, damn you, woman, there's religion in it!" 
 cried Oliver. "I'll never get that. Oh, I don't mean 
 Church of England." 
 
 Laura was no longer staring at her drawing. He was 
 interesting her at last. 
 
 "What is it you put in?" 
 
 He shook at her impatiently as he stood behind her. 
 There was real passion in his voice. 
 
 "I don't know." She was honestly puzzled. "I'm not 
 bad, I know. But you you imagine a lot." And then, 
 consolingly, "I shouldn't worry. You just see in ten 
 years you'll be at the top. I'm sure of it. But I shall 
 fizzle out. I'm bored with it already this medium, any- 
 how. Oh, don't you see?" She followed up her thoughts 
 as, exploring, one follows strange footfalls in the dark of 
 a passage "Don't you feel what the difference is? You 
 a man a man has got to put himself into only one
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 183 
 
 thing, painting or music or whatever it is. But a girl can 
 put herself into whatever happens along. He has a gift 
 for painting. She has just a gift. Oh, don't you see? 
 Isn't it interesting? I never thought of it before. That's 
 the difference between men and women. You're born 
 craftsmen; but we it's not the craft we care about. It's 
 just something in us the religion, as you say that's got 
 to get out somewhere anywhere. "We could be just as re- 
 ligious over cooking a dinner." 
 Oliver writhed. 
 
 "Oh, but we could. Look here I'm doing this for my 
 grandfather. He's never been able to afford to come to 
 Italy. So it's got to be good to please him. If I did it 
 like yours, to be sold, without knowing to whom it was 
 going well, I couldn't do it. It wouldn't be worth doing 
 for its own sake. I shouldn't enjoy it. You can't under- 
 stand that, can you? That's because you're an artist and 
 I 'm not, and never shall be, religion or no religion. ' ' 
 
 Her brilliant face was very close to his as she sat and 
 talked to him over her shoulder: she always lit up like a 
 little Christmas tree when she was excited. He thought, 
 with a touch of heady self-congratulation, that she had 
 never talked to him like this before (forgetting how little 
 chance he usually gave her). He did not realize how im- 
 personal were her speculations, he marvelled merely that 
 she should be so charming to him. "There must be some 
 reason ! ' ' cried his eager vanity. 
 
 "Keligion?" He hesitated, smiling. "I believe I know 
 a better word. ' ' 
 
 She questioned him with a movement of her head. 
 
 "Love." He wondered how she would take it. 
 
 "Why " she began doubtfully, "why, of course " 
 
 And then, "Oh, Oliver, I believe you're perfectly right?" 
 
 She laughed abstractedly, fingering her chalks. The 
 suggestion had taken her fancy. It cleared up a hundred- 
 and-one points for her. It explained so many failures and 
 successes. Why, of course. ... it was not the brains . . .
 
 134 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 it was the being fond of people that counted, that made you 
 able to do things, to look pretty, to be tidy, and paint, and 
 get on with irritating people, like Oliver and Aunt Adela 
 . . . because you did it to please some one you were fond 
 of. ... It must be ghastly not to be fond of any one . . . 
 one would miss such a lot ... Oliver, for instance, was 
 quite decent really, when you got to know him . . . but 
 she would never have bothered if it hadn't been to please 
 Justin ... a shame . . . Poor Oliver! . . . 
 
 And so ended, a little guiltily, by smiling up at him. 
 
 And then, you know, he kissed her. 
 
 For myself, I don't blame Oliver. In the spring and 
 after all, they had been discussing love. Besides, as he 
 said to her some hectic moments later when, in sheer 
 breathlessness, she allowed him to speak, where was the 
 harm? Most girls liked that sort of thing. He felt ill- 
 used. She was old enough to play the game ... to ob- 
 serve the rules that every girl, every human being, ought 
 to know . . . She was a little fool . . . nothing in her after 
 all ... nothing whatever. . . . 
 
 For Laura, after one paralysed, open-mouthed moment, 
 had risen in her wrath (literally risen she sent the easels 
 flying) and overwhelmed him : and while she told him, with 
 impassioned accuracy, what she thought of him, and Oliver 
 rose from the wreck to answer, for characteristically his 
 first concern had been his canvas, she scrubbed her out- 
 raged cheek with her pocket-handkerchief; or it may have 
 been her paint-rag, for there was little, in those days, to 
 choose between them. 
 
 And that, curiously, infuriated Oliver. Mere angry 
 words he was accustomed to discount, but all the irresistible 
 apologies he had premeditated, all his assumption of savoir- 
 faire, melted before the spectacle of that all too genuine 
 disgust. There remained the raw juvenile, wanting to say : 
 "Yah! suppose you think that's funny!" like a small boy 
 quarrelling with his sister. 
 
 What he said, however, and with intense dignity, was
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 135 
 
 "You're only making yourself streaky. That rag's 
 thick with cadmium." Then he exploded. "Look here, 
 Laura, I 'm not a disease ! ' ' 
 
 "I don't care what you are," she blazed. "I don't want 
 to discuss it. I don't want to speak to you at all. If 
 you're so eaten up with conceit that I can't be nice to 
 
 you Oh, you don't suppose," she adjured him, "that 
 
 I should ever have bothered to be nice to you to you 
 except to please the Clouds? I don't like you. I never 
 did like you. I don't want to like you. Only you're 
 Justin's friend, so I have to be polite to you." 
 
 "I suppose that's what you call it?" he enquired bit- 
 terly: and, for an instant, she stared at him blankly, all 
 her dignity endangered by a spasm of untimely mirth. 
 She controlled it in a flash, and hardening from hot anger 
 into cold, sat down again on her stool, picked up her scat- 
 tered chalks and ignored him for a full quarter of an 
 hour. But if there had been, at that critical moment, a 
 twinkle in Oliver's eye, I believe that she might have been 
 jockeyed into forgiveness. It was always fatally easy to 
 make Laura laugh. 
 
 But Oliver "Weathersby Seton, jester to the world at 
 large, had yet to learn that there was anything to laugh 
 at in Oliver "Weathersby Seton. He sat wrapped in of- 
 fence, vexed indeed with himself, but, because his vanity 
 was in shreds, doubly and trebly vexed with the unaccom- 
 modating Laura. He thought that he had never happened 
 on so typical a bourgeoise ... it just showed how ap- 
 pearances could deceive even a man of his experience. . . . 
 He would have vouched for a temperament ... it showed 
 in every clean-cut line of her. . . . Yet here she was, kick- 
 ing up a fuss like a vicar's daughter! ... He wondered 
 where it would end? . . . He believed she was capable of 
 blurting out the whole idiotic business to Mrs. Cloud . . . 
 exaggerating, of course . . . Well, it couldn't be helped. 
 ... Or could it? ... A row with Justin would be a 
 beastly nuisance. ... If he'd dreamed she'd take it like
 
 136 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 that . . . such a pretty girl too. . . . What a waste! 
 Lord ! what a waste ! . . . 
 
 Thus Oliver to himself in the pregnant silence that had 
 fallen upon them; while at his elbow Laura, erect, im- 
 passive, attending awfully to her work and nothing else 
 whatever, had also her thoughts. 
 
 What a thing, what an appalling thing to happen to 
 one! Oliver must be crazy. . . . Suppose any one. . . . 
 Suppose Justin she turned cold at the mere idea suppose 
 Justin came to know of it. ... Her ears began to burn. 
 He would think that she Laura was the sort of girl 
 who got herself made love to. ... She could imagine 
 his face and the shrug of his shoulders. . . . And she could 
 never explain there was never any chance of explaining 
 things to Justin: you were summed up judged and ir- 
 revocable sentence passed for a word, a luckless phrase, a 
 nervous gaucherie . . . and you never knew exactly what 
 you had done. . . Hopeless to dream of explaining . . . 
 She supposed Oliver would be sure to tell Justin? . . . 
 they were such friends. . . . 
 
 She flushed darkly. If Oliver were such a beast as to tell 
 Justin. . . . Oh, but surely Oliver wouldn't dream of tell- 
 ing Justin? . . . 
 
 Yet she grew more and more miserable. 
 
 Suppose Oliver did tell Justin? . . . Suppose Justin 
 were absolutely disgusted? ... Of course she couldn't 
 ask Oliver not to tell Justin . . . quite impossible. ... It 
 was Oliver's business to apologize to her. . . . She never 
 intended to speak to him again except before the Clouds. 
 . . . But if, by a few words, without being nice in the 
 least. . . . She had a perfect right, if she chose, to ask him 
 to tell him to order him, that is, not to tell Justin. . . . 
 
 She turned to him, her chin high, catching her breath a 
 little. 
 
 " Oliver!" 
 
 "Er yes," said Oliver. 
 
 "I want to say I merely want to say whatever I think
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 187 
 
 of you myself I shan't I don't want you it doesn't 
 seem to me necessary to bother Mrs. Cloud. ' ' 
 
 ' ' Certainly not ! ' ' said Oliver fervently. 
 
 There was a pause. 
 
 "Or or anybody," she added lamely. 
 
 ' ' No no. ' ' He agreed with her. 
 
 Again they paused, relenting imperceptibly to each other 
 in their mutual relief. 
 
 But Laura wanted to be quite sure. 
 
 "So that's settled," she said. And then, like a woman, 
 ' 'Oh, Oliver, why were you hateful?" 
 
 He flung out his hands. 
 
 "Lord knows!" He fidgeted. Suddenly he looked up 
 at her with a boy's grin. "I say let's chuck it, Laura?" 
 
 "Oh, well " she said grudgingly. "Oh, well " 
 
 And then in most casual afterthought as she turned to her 
 boxes (it was time to pack up: she could see Mrs. Cloud 
 and Justin far away down the road) "And Oliver? You 
 won 't tell Justin, of course ? ' ' 
 
 At that word a great light broke upon Oliver, a light so 
 dazzling that quite literally he stood and blinked, and still 
 stood, staring at Laura's unconscious back, while it lit up 
 and flooded and overflowed every nook and corner of his 
 memory. 
 
 So that was why ! ... So that, a dozen times and more, 
 had been why! . . . He shook with sudden laughter as he 
 kicked himself for a fool and laughed again. He felt a new 
 man. Here was wine for his vanity, oil for his insulted 
 heart. It wasn't that she didn't appreciate him. ... It 
 was simply that her eyes were otherwise occupied. . . . 
 Oh, well then! . . . He hoped he was enough man of the 
 world to understand the situation. . . . 
 
 With gusto he adopted the role of kindly cynic. 
 
 Bless their hearts, he wouldn't interfere. . . . But what 
 a pair of innocents! . . . Did they think all the world as 
 blind as they were themselves? . . . "Of course you won't 
 tell Justin?" . . . The dear girl! . . .
 
 138 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 Oliver, you perceive, was his jaunty self again. 
 
 But (and, you know, I like Oliver) all he said to Laura 
 
 and with the utmost gravity was 
 
 1 ' All right ! I won 't if you won 't. ' ' 
 "Oh, I won't," she assured him. 
 "Then I won't," said Oliver. 
 And that is why Justin never knew.
 
 CHAPTER XVII 
 
 TRAVELLING north, they travelled backwards from early 
 summer, through late and middle spring, and came to their 
 own hill-top at last, to find the roads still grey and 
 wrinkled with winter mud, and only the beeches green, for 
 Brackenhurst was always three weeks behind the rest of 
 Kent. Laura settled down with touching good faith to 
 enjoy her spring all over again and more completely than 
 before, because Oliver was left behind in Italy and could not 
 interrupt. She actually believed, you see, that life will 
 give you the same good gift twice over. Oh, of course, she 
 did not expect to see so much of Justin now that she was 
 at home. . . . Importantly she acknowledged her duties, 
 her social and parochial duties, to Gran 'papa and Aunt 
 Adela and Brackenhurst. . . . And Justin would be going 
 to business. . . . She was vague about his income and 
 responsibilities, but she took it for granted that his days 
 would be fully employed. 
 
 They were, but not as she expected. Aunt Adela was 
 quite horrified when Laura's notions were accidentally con- 
 veyed to her. 
 
 "Oh no, my dear, why shouldn't he? Oh, of course old 
 Mr. Cloud used to go up two or three times a week. His 
 hobby there was no real necessity. Besides, it's been a 
 company for years now. Mrs. Gedge told me so. Mrs. 
 Gedge has shares. And Mrs. Cloud has money of her own 
 as well. What should Justin Cloud go to business for?" 
 
 What indeed? Laura was only too pleased to find that 
 Justin would have time on his hands. Firmly she sup- 
 pressed the conviction of her industrious forebears, the in- 
 herited conviction that a man who did not begin work at 
 
 139
 
 140 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 nine in the morning and return worn out at half-past six, 
 was somehow cheating the universe. And, since there was 
 no need for Justin to work, set herself to help him to play. 
 
 But there again they differed. 
 
 They had talked about Architecture in the Italian play- 
 ground, about Botticelli, and Carpaccio, and Dante, and 
 Excavations, and Francis of Assisi, and Giotto, and so on 
 steadily through the alphabet to Virgil and Zenobius. And 
 vaguely, without actually canvassing the matter, she ex- 
 pected to go on thinking and talking to Justin about these 
 entirely satisfactory and absorbing subjects for the rest 
 of their natural lives. But she had reckoned without 
 Justin, without old habits, and a flying visit to Bellew, and 
 an enlarged but by no means completed collection crying 
 out for attention. Art? when nests were tucked away 
 in the Brackenhurst hedges and nests swinging high in the 
 Brackenhurst woods and birds rising from every tussock 
 of green heather on flat-topped Brackenhurst Hill to mis- 
 lead the enemy? Art? Art was in Italy, or if she must 
 cross Europe with them at Laura's invitation, Justin, like 
 a sensible Briton, insisted on finding her lodgings in town. 
 And there they had left her, the foreigner, the bored great 
 lady, to yawn away her days in Chelsea attics and over- 
 heated galleries. Of course they promised to come and 
 look her up constantly: and Laura meant, and Justin 
 thought he meant, to keep that promise. But the train 
 service from Brackenhurst was a slow one : and the weather 
 was perfect. 
 
 Besides didn't Laura understand? he enjoyed potter- 
 ing round the fields with a collecting box. 
 
 But after Botticelli birds' eggs? 
 
 I know. I know. It's distressing. Naturally, you want 
 an explanation: and if the case were a woman's, I could 
 satisfy you. I 'm sure I could ; for, if you can but happen 
 upon it, there is always sound policy behind a woman's 
 wildest extravagance drinks of pearl or Bartholomew 
 Eves. But Nero fiddles because he enjoys fiddling and
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 141 
 
 wants to see the pretty fire. And if we accept that ele- 
 mentality as, if not justifying, at least explaining our mere 
 man, how much more must it suffice us in eonsiderating that 
 amiable reductio ad absurdum of a man that we call a col- 
 lector. I am to explain to you a collector? I am to ex- 
 plain why a respectable elderly lawyer runs about Epping 
 Forest with a butterfly net on Sunday afternoons? why 
 your favourite jeune premier haunts a down-at-heel farm- 
 house for the twin china spaniels' sake upon its parlour 
 mantelpiece? why a square inch of orange paper changed 
 hands the other day for near a thousand pounds? and why 
 H. J. Cloud, Esq., after refreshing dalliance with the 
 wonders of a wonderful world, returns, unconscious of in- 
 congruity, to his home, to his habit, to his hobby, to his 
 beloved and incomparable birds' eggs? How can I ex- 
 plain? What am I to say? Collectors are made that 
 way. We must accept them as we accept love, or triplets, 
 or earthquakes, as eccentricities of Nature, unaccountable 
 but interesting. 
 
 Besides, I collect pewter myself. 
 
 So taking Justin for granted But that, you see, is 
 
 what Laura could not do. 
 
 Here was Justin, with his years, his brains, his position 
 why why he had been to Oxford! He would have been 
 a B.A. if he hadn't had influenza! He had been round the 
 world! He knew interesting people! He had once been 
 to dinner with Mr. Wells! A man like Justin could do 
 anything he chose go into Parliament write a book (she 
 was convinced that he could write a book if he would only 
 take the trouble, for there was a something about his let- 
 ters . . . ) and here he was, settling down to to collecting 
 birds ' eggs ! Birds ' eggs ! ! 
 
 She put it to him once in desperation "Why birds' 
 eggs?" 
 
 But then, as Justin said to her "Why not?" 
 
 They never got farther than that. 
 
 But it was patent that Laura, slightly annoying to Justin
 
 142 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 though her attitude might be, must stick to her principles 
 and remain aloof. And for a wavering, half-hearted week 
 or two she did remain aloof, attending strictly to her own 
 affairs, settling down to quiet life in Brackenhurst, to dust- 
 ing the drawing-room and paying calls with Aunt Adela 
 and bearing with a Gran 'papa grown no younger and no 
 less tetchy in two years. Out of the tail of her eye, how- 
 ever, she could observe Justin, missing her but little, it 
 seemed, as, his camera hung from his shoulder, he passed 
 her in Brackenhurst by-ways with a nod and a smile. That 
 she could have borne longer, but when she next took tea 
 at the Priory she found that Annabel Moulde, who had 
 also left school and put up her hair and who wore a frock 
 and a manner that made Laura feel childish, was also 
 taking tea at the Priory, and that Justin (who had never 
 liked Annabel) was nevertheless confiding to her, over 
 chocolate eclairs, items of oological interest that he ought 
 to have been telling Laura. (Surely he ought to have been 
 telling them to Laura?) 
 
 She said less about cruelty to parent birds, and the com- 
 parative value of a dead shell and a live songster as she 
 stood beside Justin ten minutes later at his open cabinet 
 and admired a fortnight's spoils. Justin (I do not know 
 why) had asked her to come and look at them, and Anna- 
 bel (I do not know how) had been left in the drawing- 
 room to talk to Mrs. Cloud. Annabel was calling on Mrs. 
 Cloud, wasn't she? 
 
 And Laura went out with Justin the next morning by 
 invitation, and was sound on the axiom that birds could 
 not count. On the following afternoon she was the proud 
 discoverer of a willow-wren's nest that Justin had over- 
 looked, and their Saturday whole-day expedition to the 
 Warren Woods beyond Beech Hill was such a success that 
 it became a weekly institution. 
 
 Behold her then, one warm Friday night of June, retir- 
 ing to bed at ten o'clock after a day of virtue and house- 
 wifery. Aunt Adela was away for the week-end : and after
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 143 
 
 turning out the dining-room with Maud Ann; impressing 
 her idea of chervil salad (acquired from sundry student 
 festivals in forsaken Rue Honorine) upon Aunt Adela's 
 sererely British cook; entertaining the Vicarage, that al- 
 ways mistook at-home days, with tea and small-talk; and 
 playing double-dummy, grimly, with Gran 'papa all the 
 long light beckoning evening, she felt that she was at last 
 and indeed a grown-up lady; but that as long as she had 
 her Saturdays with Justin she could bear it. Behold her 
 further, producing from the bottom of her hat-box a most 
 private store of candles (Aunt Adela did not approve of 
 young people reading in bed) washing out her newest 
 blouse and ironing it then and there with the spirit iron 
 that Mrs. Cloud had given her in Italy: and thereafter, 
 tucked up in bed, absorbed in a chronique scandaleuse, 
 with plates, of the thrush family (order Passeres), not to 
 mention their cousins the warblers and the white-throats, 
 and their collaterals the tits and the finches and the pipits 
 and the shrikes, and so leave her, at last, in the dazed mid- 
 dle of a sentence, to sleep and the shifting pageant of her 
 dreams. 

 
 CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 LAURA was awakened by a soft warmth upon her cheek, a 
 touch that might have been a kiss or a drifting feather or 
 her kitten's tentative paw, but was, when she lifted lazy 
 hands to it, no more than a beam of sunshine, a finger-tip 
 of morning, thrust in between thick hangings to rouse a 
 votary. 
 
 She was out of bed in an instant, barefooted and clear- 
 eyed, paying her vows in deep breaths of pure pleasure, 
 while the hoarse jingle of the curtain rings, as she pulled 
 them apart, attuned like a clash of cymbals to the choruses 
 of the birds. 
 
 Early as it was, the dawn, dewy, startled, fugitive, had 
 disappeared and the perfect day spread itself before her, 
 arrogantly, from hill to hill, a peacock trailing splendours 
 of blue and green and gold. Already earth-line and sky- 
 line were melting into one, and the distant valleys and the 
 little red-capped villages were half hidden in a quivering 
 haze of heat. The breeze, tiny and half asleep, was bur- 
 dened with the scents of a hundred fields and woods and 
 gardens. The church clock, chiming five, sang seconds to 
 the treble of the larks and in the roses at her elbow the 
 bees boomed out their bass. And the sunlight, like the 
 Spirit of God, brooded over the beautiful land. 
 
 She leaned out and caught at the great barbed ropes of 
 briar swinging loose from the wall, and pulled them up to 
 her to plunge with the greater ease face and neck into the 
 massed delicacy of the roses, pink and white and cream, 
 twenty sisters to a stalk: and drew back at last, too 
 drenched with dew to think of bed again, to have her bath 
 and plan over the expedition to come. 
 
 She sang herself joyful little songs as she sponged and 
 
 144
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 145 
 
 splashed, till old Mr. Valentine at the other side of the wall, 
 an early reader if not an early riser, drew the bedclothes 
 about his afflicted ears. Grandfather and granddaughter 
 shared an inability to keep in tune that was as constant as 
 their wincing criticism of tunelessness in other folk. They 
 were both fond of music ; yet, where music was concerned, 
 they had no sympathy whatever with each other. Gran'- 
 papa, an hour later, before his study window, his fiddle at 
 his chin, filled the house with the staccato of Duncan Gray 
 has come to woo, and was perfectly happy. But Laura, set- 
 ting the breakfast table, wondered merely how long the 
 canary would stand it and was impishly ready to applaud, 
 with a chuckle and a chink of cups, when the sudden spate 
 of shrill, contemptuous melody poured through the house 
 like sunlight and left Gran 'papa's tune to glimmer 
 wretchedly like a day-foundered glow-worm or belated will- 
 o '-the-wisp. 
 
 But who could expect Laura to have thoughts or sym- 
 pathies for a grandfather when there was Cook to be inter- 
 viewed, and a luncheon basket packed, and a new ribbon to 
 be twisted round an old hat before ten o'clock and Justin 
 came or Gran 'papa, fidgeted by the bustle, to remember 
 very clearly those outings of his own with sandal shoes 
 and a doll's sunshade fifty years ago? The pair rasped 
 each other throughout breakfast with the sour implacability 
 and perfect mutual understanding of a couple of croquet 
 players. 
 
 Gran 'papa bent his head reverently over his dish of 
 whiting as Laura handed him his coffee. 
 
 ' ' For-what-we-are-about-to-receive-may-the-Lord-make-us- 
 truly-thankf Mi-underdone ! " he remarked. 
 
 Laura was perfunctory in her concern. She was wonder- 
 ing, with an eye on the egg-boiler, if the eggs were hard 
 yet and whether Justin would eat more than three. 
 
 Gran 'papa buried his hooked nose in his coffee cup, and 
 emerged again, wiping his beard while he selected his 
 epithet.
 
 146 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 ' ' Dish-water, ' ' he decided pleasantly. ' ' And luke-warm. 
 Another cup, if you please." 
 
 ' ' Sorry, Gran 'papa, ' ' Laura prided herself on her coffee : 
 could not be expected to agree. 
 
 "Sorry! Sorry!" Gran 'papa worried joyously at the 
 word. "If it tread on a gentlewoman's gown or commit a 
 murder, 'sorry' is this generation's utmost effort at 
 apology. ' ' 
 
 Sandwiches . . . and a lettuce ... an egg for herself 
 and three for Justin. . . . Yes, that would do nicely. . . . 
 Here Laura caught Mr. Valentine's eye and realized that 
 an answer was expected. 
 
 "Oh, sorry, Gran 'papa," said Laura meekly and was 
 instantly aware that it was the wrong one. 
 
 "I assure you, my dear, that you are mistaken in think- 
 ing rudeness a sauce to good wit," said Gran 'papa, always 
 at his most Shakespearean when offended. 
 
 Laura roused herself. She knew how to appease him. 
 
 "Why, is it not a lamentable thing, grandsire, that we 
 should be thus afflicted by these 'Pardon me's'f" she coun- 
 tered, twinkling. 
 
 He gave his gruff chuckle. His granddaughter did not 
 wear her hair in smooth bands as a gentlewoman should: 
 used slang (mild enough, oh, Gran 'papa Valentine!) and 
 slurred her speech in the detestable modern fashion : had, 
 in short, innumerable faults of her own; but she could al- 
 ways be trusted to cap a quotation. He held out an olive 
 branch. 
 
 "The weather seems likely to hold. You should have a 
 pleasant picnic. You are taking ?" 
 
 "Oh, eggs and salad and bread-and-cheese, and Justin's 
 bringing peaches and anything else going. We shall have 
 a gorgeous spread." 
 
 "A feast," agreed Gran 'papa, too graciously, "of ori- 
 ental magnificence." 
 
 " Oh, you know what I mean !" Laura laughed. "Will 
 you excuse me, Gran 'papa? There's such a lot so see
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 147 
 
 to still and Justin hates waiting dislikes, I mean: 
 sorry ! ' ' 
 
 Gran 'papa hid his feelings in his newspaper. 
 
 But, hurry as Laura might, Justin was at the bow win- 
 dow when she returned, elbows on the sill, talking over the 
 morning 's news with Gran 'papa. 
 
 "Justin! Here already? I didn't know." 
 
 "Ai didn't neu," murmured Gran 'papa abstractedly. 
 He was annoyed at the interruption. 
 
 Laura flushed. She could not bear being criticized be- 
 fore Justin. 
 
 "I'm awfully sorry to be late," she began. 
 
 "Awfully," commented Gran 'papa with interest. 
 
 "Filled, that is to say, with awe " Then, testily 
 
 "What is the matter now, my dear?" 
 
 "I'm awf extremely sorry to bother you, Gran 'papa," 
 said Laura patiently, "but you're sitting on the lettuce." 
 Then to the maid crossing the hall "Cook! Cook! Oh, 
 Cook, you might bring me my basket, will you? I left it 
 in the kitchen. ' ' 
 
 "Her voice was ever soft," confided Gran 'papa to Justin 
 as he reseated himself "and gentle and low, an excellent 
 thing in woman!" 
 
 Justin nodded. 
 
 "That always reminds me of Mother. All women 
 squeak, it seems to me, except Mother. Laura's not half so 
 bad as some, though, except when she gets excited." He 
 smiled at her generously. "Hurry up, old thing! What 
 an age you are ! ' ' 
 
 "I am hurrying. I'm hurrying as much as ever I can. 
 Can't you see I'm hurrying?" Laura, badgered beyond 
 endurance, jabbed her hat-pins through her hat and made 
 heatedly for the door. 
 
 But she turned again, my tender-conscience Laura, to 
 say pleasantly 
 
 "You've got the paper, haven't you? Good-bye, Gran'- 
 papa ! ' '
 
 148 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 "Goodbaye," said Gran 'papa, hunched in his chair like a 
 malicious old eagle. His shoulders shook as the door 
 closed and he gave his dry, birdlike chuckle. 
 
 "Goodbaye," repeated Gran 'papa with relish, and re- 
 turned to his Times. 
 
 But Laura, edging along young cornfields in Justin's 
 wake, had been stirred to expostulations. 
 
 "I do think you might have backed me. Gran 'papa's 
 impossible sometimes. It's absolute pedantry. And he 
 doesn't mind who's there. He says I slur my words! I 
 don't, do I? As if I could help it, anyhow." 
 
 "Adenoids, I expect," said Justin sympathetically. 
 "You ought to have 'em seen to," and was surprised that 
 Laura was silent for the next few minutes. 
 
 Not that he objected. Laura listened so well that he 
 would have described her as a brilliant talker; but when 
 she did talk she was always a little too quick for him. She 
 had had, indeed, to break herself of a tendency to finish his 
 sentences for him ; for he never thought ahead, but when a 
 question was asked him, or an aspect presented, he would 
 always pause, in his unhurried fashion, to view the matter 
 from all points of the compass before proceeding on his 
 conversational itinerary, and so was apt to come from a 
 totally unexpected quarter to his impeccable conclusions. 
 Indeed he presented his truisms with such an air of having 
 discovered them all by himself that nine out of ten people 
 thought him original; while the tenth laughed and loved 
 him. His solemnity, you see, to those discerning ones, was 
 and would be all his life so disarmingly the seriousness 
 of the small boy who, on one of his mother's at-home days, 
 had greeted a clerical stranger encountered on the door- 
 step with 
 
 "How do you do? I'm Justin Cloud. Would you like 
 to see my football?" Then, graciously "I keep it in the 
 pantry." 
 
 And in the pantry Mrs. Cloud at last discovered her 
 rural dean, seated on the housemaid 's-box and fiercely up-
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 149 
 
 holding Rugby football to a small and intent, but entirely 
 unconvinced, believer in Association methods. 
 
 For Justin, then as now, was not easily shaken in his be- 
 lief. He was the reverse of blatant : indeed, he seldom vol- 
 unteered an opinion on any subject unasked; but once 
 asked, he was maddeningly sure of himself. Laura always 
 considered him her most liberal education in self-control; 
 for she never argued with him (and they were both young 
 enough to revel in argument) without yearning in the latter 
 end to shake him. Yet he had an occasional attractive way 
 of suddenly and so sweetly seeing your point of view that 
 you were bewildered into receiving the capitulation with 
 extravagant gratitude and a conscience-stricken sub-convic- 
 tion that he was probably right after all. But when, after 
 hesitation, you looked up to tell him so, you would usually 
 find that his eye and his attention hJad wandered past you 
 to the new picture on the wall, or the robins on the lawn. 
 Indeed, you would be lucky if he had not picked up a book. 
 To avert that catastrophe you would, if you were Laura, 
 begin humbly and hastily to talk of something else. 
 
 So Laura, though the adenoids rankled, was at the end of 
 her five minutes ready for him again with a more attractive 
 subject than herself. She headed him gently towards his 
 birds' eggs, had him perfectly contented rehearsing old 
 finds and anticipating new ones. 
 
 And because he was happy, she was happy too. And 
 they had a successful morning, with three redstarts ' eggs in 
 Justin's moss-lined collecting-box, and two photographs, 
 at the end of it, and a peaceful and protracted lunch. 
 Justin gratified Laura, as a man always does gratify a 
 woman when he enjoys his food. It was so lucky that she 
 had boiled that third egg. . . . She had known that two 
 would not be enough. . . . 
 
 Afterwards Justin, lulled by the sun and the silence and 
 the scent of wild thyme, and possibly by that third egg, 
 went to sleep : and Laura sat and watched him and com- 
 pared his serene repose with the lax, crimson, open-mouthed
 
 150 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 slumber of lesser men Wilfred and James, and gentlemen 
 in railway carriages, and even Gran 'papa. You could 
 hear Gran 'papa quite clearly on still nights. . . . But 
 Justin stood the test of sleep. Sleep did not betray Justin 
 or betrayed only that there was nothing to betray. For 
 Life had dealt him no blow as she passed too close, her 
 mighty wings had as yet but fanned him from afar. 
 There was no signature of care or joy or sin about eyes 
 and mouth and forehead: the face had no history: was 
 like a fine new building, needing the scars and mellowing 
 of time to temper it to beauty. 
 
 But Laura missed nothing. Laura, who never saw a 
 fault in anything she loved, could not be expected to find 
 faultlessness a flaw. If Laura thought at all, if the hot, 
 scented quiet of the afternoon had not made her mind as 
 drowsy as Justin's body, her thoughts were not critical, 
 only observant, as they strayed with her eyes in a voyage 
 of discoverey over the face that she was never tired of 
 watching. 
 
 It was so interesting to see Justin with his eyes shut. 
 ... It altered him . . . and the smoothing of the faint 
 habitual frown between his brows . . . gave him self-re- 
 liant, self-sufficing Justin a child 's look, a defenceless look, 
 that caused her a strange, maternal pang. It made her, she 
 did not know why, put out her hand to him and touch the 
 rough tweed of his coat : and so sit patiently, bent forward 
 a little, watching over him. 
 
 He woke at last, noiselessly, as he did everything, and 
 surprised her intent look. 
 
 ' ' Hullo, Laura ! What 's up ? ' ' 
 
 Laura in emergency was always superb. There was not 
 the adumbration of a pause between his question and her 
 reply. 
 
 "A mosquito! Keep still!" She clapped her hands to- 
 gether over an imaginary insect. "They're beginning to 
 bite. You've been asleep. Oh, look!"
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 151 
 
 A rabbit, startled by the sudden noise, was scattering 
 into its hole, fatly, with a flicker of white tail. 
 
 Laura laughed. 
 
 "The Duchess! The Duchess! Oh, my dear paws! 
 Oh, my fur and whiskers! Did you ever see such a drunken 
 lollop? He was tipsy with sunshine, Justin. You know, 
 it's most dissipated for a rabbit to be out at this hour. He 
 ought to be in bed." She stretched out lazy arms. "Oh 
 isn't it hot? How you can stand the sun pouring down 
 on you like that ! Come into the shade, Justin what there 
 is of it, .at least." 
 
 She moved a little, leaving him half the ragged patch of 
 shadow from the sloe-bush under which she sat. She 
 loved woods and shadow and cool, as Justin loved heat and 
 sunshine and open spaces ; but unless she had owned, as she 
 would not do, to her one vanity, her delicate skin, she was 
 never allowed more than a sloe-bush for shelter. 
 
 But today Justin was ready to agree that the sun might 
 be too hot even for him. He dragged himself into the 
 shade and sat beside her, pulling idly at the yellow heads 
 of hawksbit that shone like midget suns in the cropped 
 grass, while he stared out over the wide country that ran 
 down from the bare hot chalk slope into the green valley 
 land, and up again to hilltops pale as the sky. 
 
 "Not bad," he drawled at last, "not half bad! Do you 
 know anything like it ? " 
 
 Laura pronounced judgment. 
 
 "I don't believe I'm biassed. The Alps were the Alps. 
 And I loved the Rhone and I've seen Italy and I've 
 heard Oliver talk about Greece. But all of them all 
 Europe is only a setting for England and England's 
 only a setting for Kent and Kent's only a setting for 
 Brackenhurst. I believe I love Brackenhurst as if it were 
 a person. How I shall ever leave I don't know!" 
 
 "Leave it! Leave it! How d'you mean, leave it?" 
 He was irritated. He always disliked even a hint of
 
 152 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 change: it implied discomfort. He shrank in angry bore- 
 dom from spring-cleaning, and death, and new acquaint- 
 ances. 
 
 Laura laughed. 
 
 ' ' Oh, not for a year or two. But dear old Gran 'papa ! 
 he's wonderful, of course. D'you know that he does his 
 mile to the post and back every day still? Will do it. 
 But he's eighty for all that. Is it hateful of me to think 
 ahead?" 
 
 Justin gave his thoughtful grunt. 
 
 "Of course, if the boys helped cared about Green 
 Gates we could stay on. But you know what Wilfred 
 and James are. Besides, they're bound to get married." 
 
 He gave her a quick look. But her grave, innocent eyes 
 were fixed on the distant hills. 
 
 Justin's grunt was more pronounced than ever. 
 
 She continued. She enjoyed submitting her simple 
 plans. It was so seldom that Justin was in a listening 
 mood. 
 
 "Oh, I've thought it out. When I have to I'm going 
 to teach. You know my literature and English are pretty 
 good. I can get a berth at my old school any day. 
 They've told me so. Well then, you see if I have a screw 
 of my own there'll be plenty over if we let Green Gates, 
 to take old Mrs. Golding's lodge at the top of the village. 
 It wouldn't be fair to uproot Aunt Adela altogether. And 
 then " triumphantly she set the roofing on her castle-in- 
 the-air, ' ' I can come home for all the holidays. I shall still 
 belong here." Then, a little anxiously "Shan't I, 
 Justin?" 
 
 He frowned. He did not answer her. 
 
 Her face fell. 
 
 "Don't you What do you think?" 
 
 "I've never heard such utter rot in my life," said Justin. 
 He paused. He 1 considered. Then he delivered himself, 
 judgmatically. 
 
 "I don't like it," said Justin. "I don't like the idea.
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 153 
 
 I don't like it at all. Teaching! I don't know what's got 
 into you, ' ' he grumbled. 
 
 He was not thinking of her and she knew it. Yet his 
 annoyance was an exquisite gratification. She knew that 
 he would miss her, but she had not expected that he would 
 realize it beforehand. She had looked for interest, con- 
 gratulation even. She had not dared hope for concern. 
 
 "You know," he pursued, "the old lady won't like it 
 either. She's got so used to you." 
 
 He was distinctly worried. 
 
 "So have I, for that matter," he volunteered. 
 
 He fidgeted with his ear. 
 
 "It's a problem," he said. 
 
 Laura said nothing. 
 
 "Isn't it?" he appealed to her in his turn. 
 
 She roused herself. 
 
 "Oh no! I've practically decided it all. Aunt Adela 
 will expect me to make up her mind, just as Gran 'papa 
 does for her now. It will work all right." 
 
 "There are all those eggs and things to be seen to when 
 I'm away. And not a maid I can trust!" He laughed; 
 yet there was a touch of real injury in his tone. "I sup- 
 pose you haven't thought of that?" 
 
 ' ' Oh, Justin I 'd stay if I could, ' ' said Laura piteously. 
 "You don't suppose I shall enjoy leaving home?" 
 
 "Well, but look here " He paused again. 
 
 "I shall be back for all the holidays," she consoled her- 
 self and him. "And your mother isn't bed-ridden, you 
 know. There'll be plenty to take my place." 
 
 "Yes, but she'll miss you." 
 
 ' ' I hope so, ' ' said Laura wistfully. 
 
 He flushed. 
 
 "I daresay you'll be surprised to hear me say so," he 
 prepared her, "but so shall I." 
 
 Laura glowed. 
 
 "I'm awfully glad." 
 
 "But why should you " he began again.
 
 154. FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 "Not yet, Justin. Gran 'papa may live another two 
 years. But he's breaking up. I noticed the difference at 
 once. It's the winter that the doctor is afraid of poor 
 Gran 'papa ! ' ' 
 
 "But even then " Justin pursued his own thoughts. 
 
 Then with an effort : ' ' Look here ! Why shouldn 't you 
 
 Why shouldn't we I mean Look here, Laura! 
 
 Would you care to stay on here marry me? Then we 
 needn't have any upset." 
 
 "Justin!" 
 
 ' ' Will you ? Honestly it wouldn 't be a bit a bad idea. ' ' 
 
 Laura faced him with grave, scarlet-cheeked dignity. 
 
 "I don't think I don't think I don't like that sort of 
 joke. It's not like you. It's hateful!" She was in- 
 tensely distressed. 
 
 He opened his serious eyes. 
 
 "Joke?" 
 
 She stared at him, lips parted. 
 
 "Justin! You can't mean you couldn't mean 
 Aren 't you pulling my leg ? Justin, you couldn 't possibly 
 be in earnest?" 
 
 Some depth in his nature was stirred by her tone. He 
 leant forward quite eagerly. 
 
 "Will you marry me, then? Naturally I'm in earnest. 
 I'm awfully fond of you really. And the old lady will 
 be tremendously pleased. Will you marry me?" 
 
 She looked at him, breathless, her lips trembling, day 
 dawning in her eyes. 
 
 "Oh, Justin oh, Justin what do you think? Of 
 course I will!" 
 
 "That's all right then!" 
 
 There was naive complacency in his tone: it expressed 
 his sense of a wise measure successfully concluded no 
 more. No more yet for an instant he had remained lean- 
 ing towards her with the strangest mingling of indecision, 
 emotion and intention in his pose, as if his body were wiser 
 than his soul.
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 155 
 
 But she, because she was frightened of her own happi- 
 ness, and of him and his quick movement, sat quite still, 
 restraining the answering gesture that would have won 
 him: and the moment passed like a flower without fruit. 
 Justin, lazing back again, smiled at her with his immemo- 
 rial air of comfortable affection. Dear old Laura! . . . 
 He was satisfied pleased with himself and her. Minor 
 satisfactions, seen reminiscently, subconsciously, out of 
 the tail of his mind's eye the summer day, the summer 
 sun, the eggs in his collecting box, the crisp, crunchable 
 lettuce at lunch, his pipe and the smoke of his pipe 
 all added their mites to the sum of his content. Dear old 
 Laura! . . . 
 
 Her voice added itself soothingly to his meditations. He 
 thought, as he listened to her, that old Valentine had 
 talked through his hat that morning. . . . Laura rough? 
 Laura shrill? Why, even he himself had never noticed 
 before how low and soft her voice was. . . . 
 
 For Laura was talking talking for time : she feared the 
 silence that had fallen upon them. She was not ready to 
 be confronted with her naked bliss. Feverishly she sought 
 for words in which to clothe, to veil it from herself. Yet 
 she could think of nothing else. She began 
 
 "Justin I'll be so good to you. You'll see. I'll never 
 get in your way. I'll learn cooking. I'll never read books 
 
 till after tea. I'll do everything " The sentence died 
 
 away happily. 
 
 "I must say " there was distinct gratification in 
 
 Justin's grave voice, ''it seems an excellent idea. I won- 
 der I never thought of it before. Mother '11 be awfully 
 bucked. She likes you, you know." He paused for 
 Laura's gratitude. 
 
 But Laura, her heart full of dreams, forgot to respond. 
 
 "And I can tell you, you ought to be jolly pleased. It 
 isn't every one Mother likes," he added impressively. 
 
 "Of course I'm pleased." Laura smiled. "But I knew 
 she did, Justin. She was always good to me. It was you
 
 156 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 I didn't know I never thought " She checked her- 
 self prettily. 
 
 "That's why," he continued calmly, "it seems such a 
 good arrangement. You know, I never have liked the 
 idea of her being alone when I'm away: only she never 
 will have any one but old Mary. But if I knew you were 
 in the house I shouldn't be uneasy. I shouldn't have to 
 hurry back so, then." 
 
 She lifted her head. For an instant her eyes had a 
 strange, wise look in them, as if some older self, till then 
 quiescent in her, were roused in her defence were watch- 
 ing him with knowledge and foreboding of pain. 
 
 The look passed in a smile, smile at Justin verging upon 
 unusual enthusiasm; yet, though she herself did not know 
 it, the look had been there. 
 
 "Oh, it'll make a big difference, Laura, I can tell you," 
 he was. concluding. "All the difference in the world." 
 
 "AM the difference in the world," repeated Laura after 
 him. 
 
 -"There's that expedition " he burst out again as, his 
 
 impedimenta shouldered and the greasy luncheon-papers 
 tucked down a rabbit hole, they walked home together 
 through the deep lanes. "You know it's still a possi- 
 bility. Bellew promised me the first refusal, though I've 
 practically told him I couldn't manage it. And yet to 
 miss such a chance ! But now once we 're married eggs ! 
 Think of it, Laura ! Up and down every cliff from Lundy 
 to the Orkneys with Bellew. Bellew! I tell you he 
 knows more about birds than any man in England. Wish 
 I weren't such a rotten sailor, but that's a detail." He 
 drew a deep breath. "And I haven't any gulls yet, you 
 know. Remember those specimens at old Greets' sale? 
 I'm glad now I didn't buy 'em. Not the same bought 
 stuff. But to sweat up a cliff in a gale, hanging on by your 
 teeth and your toe-nails to get at a nest yourself, with the 
 fat old mother-bird not knowing enough to get out of your 
 way some '11 let you lift them right off before they'll
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 157 
 
 budge, you know that'll be sport! Wish you could 
 come. ' ' 
 
 "Wish I could. Oh, Justin I suppose I couldn't?" 
 
 ' ' Oh, no it 's not a woman 's show, ' ' he amended hastily. 
 ' ' It means roughing it, you know. But when I get back, ' ' 
 he consoled her, "you shall do all the classification. And 
 honestly, Laura it'll be jolly nice knowing you're at home 
 to come back to. There'll be a heap to do, sorting, and 
 printing photographs. By the way, you'd better keep my 
 letters. They'll be useful to refer to." 
 
 "Yes, Justin," said Laura, as one instructed. If her 
 thoughts turned for an instant's satisfied inspection of a 
 certain locked box in a certain locked drawer of her dress- 
 ing-table, her smile gave no hint of it to Justin. And 
 Justin's mother was not there. 
 
 Thus ran their love-talk on that first afternoon, as they 
 wandered home together. But even when they reached 
 Green Gates, and Laura stood on one side of them and he 
 on the other, Justin found it difficult to tear himself away. 
 Between his eggs and his engagement he was nearer excite- 
 ment than Laura had ever known him. 
 
 But Laura, too absorbed in him to listen to him at all, 
 had grown quiet, so quiet that at last even he must notice 
 and be concerned. 
 
 "Don't you think so, Laura? Laura! I say, Laura, 
 is anything up ? " 
 
 "Oh no, Justin." 
 
 He took her hand, awkwardly, through the bars of the 
 gate, with that look of boyish, embarrassed kindliness that 
 could always make Laura, at least, give and forgive him 
 anything. 
 
 "I say, old girl it is all right? You are pleased too? 
 You think it's a good idea?" 
 
 "The expedition?" 
 
 "Oh that too! But this notion of our getting mar- 
 ried?" 
 
 She looked up at him.
 
 158 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 "It's made me awfully happy, Justin." 
 
 "Has it? Good. That's right. So it has me. And so 
 it will Mother. I say, I ought to be home by now telling 
 her. It must be near tea-time too. You're coming round 
 tonight, aren't you?" 
 
 "I was before 
 
 "Good! Come along early." 
 
 Laura flushed brightly, but she said nothing. 
 
 He looked puzzled. 
 
 "Can't you?" 
 
 Laura looked at him between laughter and that suspi- 
 cious brightening of her dark eyes that had never yet had 
 any meaning for Justin. 
 
 "I thought it was all arranged," he said rather im- 
 patiently. 
 
 "Was it?" She pulled a splinter from the gate-post 
 and with it prodded a scuttling ant up and down the little 
 white groove. 
 
 "Wasn't it?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Well, then?" 
 
 "You might fetch me, Justin," said Laura desperately. 
 
 ' ' Oh, all right. But why ? It 's not a bit dark ! ' ' 
 
 Laura did not attempt to explain.
 
 CHAPTER XIX 
 
 JUSTIN hurried off down the road. Laura waited a little 
 while, looking after him, ready to wave and smile if he 
 should look back. He would have seen, if he had been 
 Oliver to perceive it, a pretty enough picture, for the 
 rockery behind her glowed like a Persian carpet, and she 
 stood at the gate between the copper-black hollyhocks, a 
 princesse lointaine among her Nubians, looking out so 
 eagerly over the bars, hands half raised for beckoning. 
 
 But Justin, even if he had thought of it, had not time 
 to look back. As it was, he barely escaped being late for 
 his tea. 
 
 Laura, when the bend of the road had quite hidden him, 
 gave, for all her wistful last glances, a little sigh of relax- 
 ation. She had held him while she could, and counted 
 each moment a gain ; yet she had wanted him to go. Her 
 instinct, standing godmother to her inexperience, put her 
 on her guard, would not allow her to show him the in- 
 tensity of the happiness he had created in her. Yet dis- 
 cretion was not easy, with the lust of self -confession that 
 age-old familiar of a woman in love playing its devil's 
 game with her self-control. She wanted to be alone she 
 who was Psyche in Olympus, the first draught of nectar 
 driving dizzily through her veins : she knew she must have 
 breathing-pause, must for an instant put down the inex- 
 haustible cup, lest the immortal wine should choke her. 
 
 She turned from the road, and swerving aside, like a shy 
 beast, from the eyes of the many-windowed house, sped 
 down the warden paths to the orchard, that immemorial 
 play-ground, her kingdom of deep grass and monstrous 
 buttercups, an Avalon at whose corners oaks stood guar- 
 
 159
 
 160 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 dian, whose brook-rooted bramble hedges, high and over- 
 hanging, walled it impenetrably against the outer world. 
 
 She did not stay to secure the rickety gate, and it clicked 
 and cluttered behind her like a cracked bell as she ran 
 on through the sunshine and the grass to the little shady 
 hollow beyond the apple trees and there flung herself upon 
 the ground, like a child dropping headlong upon its 
 mother's lap. 
 
 And because she had no mother, and her heart was full, 
 she turned in all simplicity to her prayers. Overhead a 
 lark was singing, and she listened, her chin in her fists, her 
 elbows digging into the soft earth, her broken phrases 
 swelling his ecstasy 
 
 "Almighty God, Father of all goodness most humble 
 
 and hearty thanks O God, I am so utterly happy. If 
 
 You only knew how grateful how grateful my creation 
 and preservation and all the blessings of my life because, 
 of course, I see now, they were all blessings Gran 'papa 
 and being poor and everything, or I shouldn't have known 
 Justin. God, I do thank You so for making Justin and 
 for letting me know him and for letting him care and 
 for all Thy goodness and loving kindness to me and all 
 men. I will be so good to him, God I promise I promise 
 I will always be good now. O God, teach me to be good 
 enough and to understand him, so that he doesn 't get tired : 
 and I pray Thee give me that due sense of all Thy mer- 
 cies Yes, I have, I have that due sense and I will 
 
 show forth Thy praise, always, always only please God, 
 teach me to be good enough that he may never be disap- 
 pointed and that I may make him happy, for Jesus Christ 's 
 sake. Amen." 
 
 She ceased, exhausted by her own passion ; but the lark 's 
 song continued, welling up untroubled like a spring of 
 pure water, from the infinite calm of the sky.
 
 CHAPTER XX 
 
 IF, a year or two later, you could have persuaded Mrs. 
 Cloud to tell you her thoughts, she would have said that she 
 always considered the engagement ring to be at the bot- 
 tom of the whole wretched business. If Laura had begun 
 by being firm . . . but Laura, she could not help feeling, 
 had been lamentably wanting in backbone where Justin 
 was concerned. . . . For Justin had his faults. . . . She 
 was his mother, but she was not like some mothers. . . . 
 She was perfectly willing to admit that Justin had his 
 faults. . . . Oh, well you could scarcely call them faults, 
 perhaps that would be too strong, but well, he was in- 
 clined to be dreamy sometimes: he had certainly been 
 dreamy over the engagement ring. . . . But still, she could 
 not help feeling that that was Laura's fault. . . . Laura 
 should have been firm. . . . 
 
 Oh, of course, if Laura liked Justin to ride rough-shod 
 over her, well and good! But then she should not have 
 turned upon him afterwards ! And that was just it if 
 they had been openly engaged it was quite reasonable that 
 they should have had their differences : their slack months, 
 so to speak, would not have mattered in the least. . . . 
 The engagement ring would have fixed their status. But 
 as it was. . . . 
 
 If Laura had had proper pride, if she had even shown 
 that she was disappointed for, of course, she must have 
 
 been disappointed Oh! (Mrs. Cloud's smile would 
 
 deprecate her worldliness) if she had done no more than 
 talk for a day or two of how fond she was of rubies or 
 of pearls or whatever it was why, then Justin would have 
 got the idea well into his head, and the ring would have 
 
 161
 
 162 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 been bought! Nobody could say that Justin was not 
 generous. . . . He must have spent pounds on the books 
 he brought back that very day for Laura. . . . But still 
 they weren't an engagement ring and nothing would make 
 them one. . . . 
 
 Thus far but you would never have got it out of her 
 a reminiscent Mrs. Cloud. 
 
 But besides Mrs. Cloud there had been Brackenhurst to 
 consider. Brackenhurst also had wanted an engagement 
 ring. Without that certificate Mr. Cloud and Miss Laura 
 Valentine might 'understand* each other Brackenhurst 
 had arranged long ago for them to do that but it coul<J 
 not call them engaged. Indeed, it had at last, in despera- 
 tion, circulated the rumour that old Mr. Valentine had 
 Put his Foot Down. Old Mr. Valentine, who still called 
 his grey-haired daughter and the niece who sometimes came 
 to stay 'the girls,' who locked the front door, winter and 
 summer, at ten o'clock, and thereafter sat up for strayed 
 revellers in his skull-cap and dressing-gown, with a candle 
 in one hand and his great gold watch open in the other, 
 and an expression upon his face that few cared to encoun- 
 ter twice old Mr. Valentine, it was said, had permitted no 
 public engagement until Laura was one-and-twenty. 
 
 It was a useful rumour, one that satisfied Brackenhurst 
 and did not displease Mrs. Cloud. Because, you see, it 
 would have been difficult to explain to the incredulous that 
 there was no engagement ring on Laura's finger because 
 because well, to tell you the truth (Aunt Adela would 
 have done it more unctuously than Mrs. Cloud), the fact 
 was that dear Justin kept on forgetting to buy one ! And 
 Laura a good girl, but, between you and Aunt Adela, 
 with curious ideas sometimes apparently didn't mind! 
 Yes. Unconventional. Very. And so was Mr. Cloud. 
 
 Oh, of course, if they were satisfied But personally 
 
 Aunt Adela would not say so to every one but personally, 
 she must say yes, exactly ! 
 
 Aunt Adela would have enjoyed herself.
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 163 
 
 You do understand that it was pure absent-mindedness 
 on Justin's part? When Justin told his mother the news 
 and the first congratulations were over, and Mrs. Cloud 
 had kissed him and he had re-sketched to her in delightful 
 detail his ideas for the future, and Mrs. Cloud had neither 
 assented nor dissented, but with her wise smile had listened 
 and changed the subject and talked to him about Laura 
 till he began to fidget because, after all, he knew all about 
 Laura, there was nothing new to say of Laura exactly 
 after that pleasant talk had died out and they had sat silent 
 a while, Mrs. Cloud had turned in her chair and begun to 
 ask lighter questions and so touched upon the subject of 
 the ring. 
 
 ' ' Oh the ring ! ' ' Justin opened his eyes. He had been 
 staring at the light window till he was nearly asleep. 
 "Oh, of course. A ring! Yes, I hadn't thought of that. 
 I '11 run up to town tomorrow. ' ' 
 
 Then he had asked his mother's advice, and they had 
 discussed the rival merits of pearls and emeralds and old 
 settings, till Justin, always thorough, and growing inter- 
 ested, had got down the Encyclopaedia and the dictionary 
 with plates. He had broken off in the middle to go and 
 fetch his Laura, very full indeed of his subject. And 
 Laura had arrived, with a shy, glowing look about her that 
 had touched Mrs. Cloud; but they were not allowed to do 
 more than kiss each other before Laura was engaged in dis- 
 cussion with Justin as to whether the biblical jasper were 
 the modern diamond, and if not why not? They got quite 
 heated about it. Mrs. Cloud sat by and listened, and 
 thought how clever they both were, and that Justin was the 
 cleverer but that Laura talked faster : and occupied herself 
 the while with taking the exact size of Laura's third finger 
 from her left-hand glove. The evening was a very pleas- 
 ant one, though upon the whole more instructive than 
 romantic. Of all three, I suppose, Mrs. Cloud went to 
 bed the happiest. Laura dreamed of a bare hill-side and 
 t^ scent of thyme and of a bird singing in the sun. Justin
 
 164. FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 dreamed of nothing at all. But Mrs. Cloud dreamed quite 
 shamelessly of grandchildren. 
 
 Justin went up to town the next day, only for a couple of 
 hours, with the measurements in his pocket. He spent 
 most of his time at South Kensington and the Jermyn 
 Street Museum, and did not get back within the week. His 
 crazes were always as thorough as they were sudden. He 
 forgot all about his birds' eggs and enjoyed himself very 
 much : and brought back, as I told you, besides a new tooth- 
 brush, a most wonderful and expensive book on precious 
 stones, Cellini 's treatise, Jones on finger rings, and a bound 
 volume of the Connoisseur as a little present for Laura. 
 
 She was spending the afternoon with his mother on the 
 day of his return, and after tea he laid his gifts in 
 triumph before her. Laura could look at such books for 
 their own sake where Mrs. Cloud looked at them for 
 Justin's; but neither motive mattered at the moment, for 
 Justin was still so delighted with them that at first he 
 would hardly let any one else look at them at all. Laura, 
 over his shoulder, was as unwearied in asking questions as 
 he in answering, and he had more or less unburdened him- 
 self, to her intent ears, of all he had seen and learned and 
 adventured, before Mrs. Cloud, verging on impatience with 
 the cool ways of your modern lovers, could find a pause 
 in which to ask about a matter of importance. 
 
 "And what else did you bring home, Justin?" She had 
 had unpacked his bag herself, but it was not there. Her 
 eyes were doubtfully on his slim pockets. 
 
 He turned over his purchases. 
 
 "Jones Connoisseur Cellini Oh, yes, and there's 
 
 a Punch in the hall " he turned to Laura again: " as 
 big as a plum and a colour! In one case alone. Oh, 
 you 've got to come up with me, Laura. You 've never seen 
 anything like it. Funny I've passed that room dozens of 
 times and never noticed before. But, of course, I was al- 
 ways after eggs."
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 165 
 
 Mrs. Cloud gave up trying to lead the conversation where 
 she wanted it to go. She cut across it. 
 
 "Justin, I'm sure Laura is longing to see her ring." 
 
 Justin frowned absently. 
 
 "Ring? What ring? Oh the ring! Oh, I say, 
 Laura I'm awfully sorry! I'm afraid I never gave it 
 another thought." 
 
 "Oh, it doesn't matter," said Laura brightly. 
 
 Mrs. Cloud said nothing emphatically, which disturbed 
 Justin more than any disapproval of Laura's would have 
 done. He turned blankly from his books. 
 
 "I shall be up again in a few days," he assured them. 
 "Or I could write," he suggested unhappily. He hated 
 writing letters. 
 
 He paused. He had an inspiration. 
 
 "I suppose you or Mother wouldn't be going up?" he 
 wondered hopefully. 
 
 Mrs. Cloud said nothing more emphatically than ever. 
 
 " I '11 go straight up again tomorrow, ' ' he decided, an eye 
 on his mother. 
 
 Laura laughed. 
 
 "What nonsense! Why, you 're only just back ! And I 
 found a corncrake 's nest yesterday. Bother the old ring ! ' ' 
 
 His face cleared. He liked Laura. 
 
 "Well if you wouldn't mind waiting till Tuesday, we 
 might both go up. A corncrake? Which field? Any 
 good for a photograph? The Museum's shut on Mondays. 
 And then we could choose it together. After all, there's 
 no hurry, is there?" 
 
 ' ' Of course not, ' ' said Laura. 
 
 Mrs. Cloud could have shaken her. 
 
 They went up together on Tuesday, and, according to 
 both of them, had a ripping time. But when Mrs. Cloud, 
 alone with Laura the next day, took the girl's two hands in 
 her own, and openly and gravely looked at them, she found 
 the left hand as bare as the right.
 
 166 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 " Laura!" Mrs. Cloud's voice implied that she was not 
 at all pleased with Laura. 
 
 Laura twinkled. 
 
 "Mrs. Cloud, we were too busy. We had such a glorious 
 day. We hadn't time, simply." 
 
 "It's ridiculous!" Mrs. Cloud's tone was sharp. She 
 was annoyed with Justin, and she felt that it was too bad 
 of Laura to put her in the position of being annoyed with 
 Justion. "You might have reminded him," she said. 
 
 Laura looked at her. 
 
 "Oh I might." Her tone was expressionless. 
 
 Mrs. Cloud's gesture disclaimed all future responsibility 
 for any one at all in the world whatever. 
 
 "He'll think of it some time or other," Laura soothed 
 her, with another twinkle. She sat smiling to herself over 
 Justin and his ways and her own odd delight in humouring 
 them. Then a new thought took her and she laughed out- 
 right. ' ' Oliver would have had it in his pocket, ' ' she said, 
 "months beforehand. Poor Oliver!" 
 
 She wondered idly what should bring him into her head 
 again. She had not thought of him for so long. She was 
 astonished to find herself considering him indulgently, all 
 irritation inexplicably dissipated. 
 
 "Oliver?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 Mrs. Cloud's eyebrows were expressive. 
 
 "Was he " she ventured. 
 
 Laura nodded. 
 
 "Really!" 
 
 Mrs. Cloud had never liked Oliver, but she neverthe- 
 less felt a new respect for Laura on his account. And then, 
 inevitably 
 
 "Does Justin know?" 
 
 Laura shrugged her shoulders. She was discovering, 
 with a touch of bewilderment, how much she had changed 
 in less than three months. For, instead of being terrified 
 at the mere chance of Justin's knowledge, she thought that
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 167 
 
 it didn't matter after all if he did, one way or another, 
 hear a disturbing rumour or two. Of course, she would 
 
 never tell him herself, but if Mrs. Cloud In fact, she 
 
 would rather like Justin to know what Oliver had thought 
 about her three months ago. That Oliver might have his 
 own feelings on the subject simply did not occur to her, any 
 more than she knew why she should like Justin to know. 
 But she knew that she did wish it and that she was tempted 
 to use Mrs. Cloud to accomplish her wish; also, that for 
 some reason or other, she was feeling vaguely ashamed of 
 herself. For it was about an upright and sensitive spirit 
 that the Maya-veil of love had been cast. Laura would 
 have been an honest soul if she had not been a woman. 
 As it was she at least tried to change the subject with 
 
 "Do you know when Rhoda and Lucy come back, Mrs. 
 Cloud?" 
 
 Mrs. Cloud would not be diverted. 
 
 "I cannot understand Justin," said Mrs. Cloud. Her 
 eyes were on Laura's hand again. 
 
 Laura flushed. 
 
 "It doesn't mean anything to a man," she said defen- 
 sively, "no more than a tie-pin." 
 
 "It's so unlike Justin." Mrs. Cloud assured herself 
 that she believed what she said. 
 
 "Oh no, Mrs. Cloud." Laura's eyes were shrewd as 
 well as wistful. "He always forgets details. You know 
 what he is. You see, it is a detail to him. It means just 
 nothing." She lifted her chin. "I'm glad. I like him 
 that way." 
 
 Mrs. Cloud was frowning, very near anger for once. 
 And yet. . . . Oh, it was extraordinary of Justin . . . but 
 she could not think that it was all his fault. . . . Laura had 
 no business to encourage him. . . . 
 
 "I shall speak to Justin," she said stiffly. 
 
 Laura caught her arm with that unseemly naked hand 
 of hers, as if Mrs. Cloud were rising on the instant. 
 
 "Oh no, Mrs. Cloud. Please! I should hate you to.
 
 168 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 I should simply hate it. I don't want it that way. If 
 
 you said anything to him Oh, please you wouldn't, 
 
 would you?" 
 
 ' ' I can say what I like to my own son, Laura, ' ' said Mrs. 
 Cloud fiercely. 
 
 "I know. I know. Of course. But " 
 
 "But what?" said Justin's mother. 
 
 "But I'm going to marry him," said Laura, softly, 
 but quite desperately. 
 
 At that they were silent, their eyes in their laps. They 
 were both hot and sore, though they could not have told 
 why : and they both said to themselves over and over again 
 that they must make allowances make allowances. 
 
 Suddenly Laura put her hand on Mrs. Cloud's knee. 
 
 "Mrs. Cloud dear Mrs. Cloud I didn't mean I only 
 wanted " 
 
 "What do you want, Laura?" 
 
 "I don't want him prompted," said Laura rather piti- 
 fully. "I want him to give it to me because he wants to 
 give it to me. Not because it's the thing to do. I 
 want " She laughed. "I want too much, don't I?" 
 
 "Men look at things so differently," said Mrs. Cloud in 
 her turn. Her anger had come and gone again like a puff 
 of summer wind. 
 
 "Yes, I know." 
 
 "He's very fond of you, my dear," said Mrs. Cloud. 
 
 "Yes. But men Oh, I wish we were all women," 
 
 cried Laura. "Things would be so much simpler. One 
 could just talk them out. But you can't talk your own 
 language to a man, can you? We're like those Indian 
 princes at the Durbar from the north and the south, whose 
 only common language was English. Even Justin and I 
 talk English, I suppose, not our own languages. At least 
 I'd talk mine, only Justin gets bored." She laughed 
 suddenly. "But I'm getting a smattering of his," said 
 Laura with satisfaction, "more than he thinks. I'll 
 I'll surprise him some day, p'raps! Am not I thine assf
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 169 
 
 Wouldn't Justin jump?" Her eyes danced. She looked 
 as wicked as a cat no Laura of Justin's acquaintance 
 at all. 
 
 "What's the matter with you, child?" cried Mrs. Cloud 
 bewildered, and at that her mood changed and her face 
 with it. She slipped down on to the floor, half sitting, 
 half kneeling at Mrs. Cloud's feet, and began (an old 
 privilege) to play with the loose rings on the beautiful 
 hand with its blue raised veins and its skin like a dried 
 petal, twisting them this way and that to make them 
 sparkle. 
 
 "Mrs. Cloud?" began Laura at last. 
 
 "Well?" 
 
 "Mrs. Cloud?" Still Laura hesitated. "Do you 
 
 think Is it always two languages? When one's 
 
 married a long time, is it different ? ' ' 
 
 "Oh, marriage is a new country altogether." Mrs. 
 Cloud was smiling again. "You both get naturalized, I 
 suppose. ' ' 
 
 They sat in silence thinking their thoughts, till at last 
 Laura gave a great, happy sigh. 
 
 "It will be lovely, being married to Justin," said Laura 
 dreamily. 
 
 "It ought to be," said Mrs. Cloud.
 
 CHAPTER XXI 
 
 I SUPPOSE that we all know summers and summers and 
 The Summer the one summer into which, for whatever 
 reason, all the forgotten others pour their glories, so that 
 for ever it glows in our minds, an Eden of sun and straw- 
 berries and roses and a frock that was a pretty frock! 
 and remembered sentences that still speak themselves in 
 our ears in a remembered voice a summer of immortal lit- 
 tle things a joke, a glance, a daisy-chain, a head turning 
 quickly, an afternoon in the hay. The other summers are 
 well enough, but their flowers, every primrose and poppy 
 of them, open in their seasons and not all at once : and they 
 are soon over. It rains for days in other summers. But 
 in The Summer 
 
 "Oh, no, it never rained," Laura would tell you. "I 
 know, because I remember. I was out of doors with Justin 
 all day long." 
 
 "What about meals?" You may ask her that if you 
 like. She will only look at you pityingly. 
 
 "What did you do all day long?" 
 
 "We walked and talked " 
 
 "What about?" 
 
 "Oh, I don't know. It was a lovely summer " 
 
 Justin would agree, I think. It was The Summer for 
 him also, the summer which justified him in calling his 
 eggs "The Collection," the summer when he had not 
 minded asking Bellew down to have a look at it, the sum- 
 mer of lucky finds and Laura's idea Bellew had been very 
 struck with Laura and her method of labelling of collect- 
 ing by counties . . . The Kent section had been practically 
 completed that summer . . . the same summer, by the way, 
 that he and Laura got engaged. . . . 
 
 170
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 171 
 
 The chill New Year found him still regretting The Sum- 
 mer, and suffering from his usual intellectual bilious at- 
 tack; for the year began with him on St. Valentine's Day, 
 and he could only get through the long winter evenings by 
 over-reading himself like a literary Jack Horner home for 
 the holidays. He grew at last so tired of himself and 
 Brackenhurst that he began to talk, to the amazed delight 
 of his mother, of a house-party ("and Justin, you know, 
 has never cared for young people!") But Mrs. Cloud's 
 joyous 
 
 "Now, whom could we have? Your cousins in York? 
 Rhoda and Lucy, of course. The Browns? the Jones'? 
 the Robinsons ? ' ' made no impression. Justin, it appeared, 
 had been thinking of Bellew, perhaps? Laura might 
 come across for a night or two. And Oliver. He hadn't 
 heard from Oliver for months. He ought to get Oliver 
 down. 
 
 "Oh! Oh, very well," said Mrs. Cloud. 
 
 But Oliver (and somehow it shocked Laura) Oliver had 
 married a wife. He wrote from Chelsea to Justin, wisely, 
 humorously, as from age to heady youth, and could not 
 possibly come. Justin must come up to them instead. 
 Laura, confronted with the letter and a "What do you 
 think of that?" wondered aloud that he did not sign it 
 Paterfamilias. But wasn't it typical of Oliver? Justin, 
 distinctly disillusioned, said 
 
 "Was it? How?" 
 
 "Oh, well, you know, I always did think " 
 
 And so she got her innings at last : was permitted to toy 
 with Oliver, to display Oliver, to turn him round and 
 round, to blow him as if he had been an egg, and at last, 
 crunching him delicately between her fingers, hand the 
 pieces to a converted Justin to toss into the waste-paper 
 basket. It was a great relief to her. 
 
 Justin, grunting agreement through a film of smoke, and 
 utterly unaware that he had not always agreed, opined that 
 all the same he must look up Oliver. Would Laura come?
 
 172 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 Laura didn't think she would. 
 
 So Justin went by himself. And as the day was foggy 
 and his boredom, thicker than fog, upon him, he found 
 Married Life, as he stumbled in upon it at five o'clock, 
 sitting on the studio floor, with tea-things and firelight and 
 a frieze of Oliver's Italian canvases for background, a 
 novel and attractive picture. 
 
 Married Life was kind to him and gave him a welcome, 
 and many muffins, besides letting him smoke; yet because 
 Married Life had definitely, though quite unobtrusively, 
 another set of delightful manners for a pampered Oliver; 
 because too, excellent wife as she seemed to be making 
 Oliver, there was something in her accent and her voice, 
 a certain obviousness in her red hair (Oliver had been more 
 faithful to Laura than Laura guessed) and because, con- 
 tradictorily, he rather enjoyed the black challenge of her 
 glances, he found himself reflecting with a new satisfaction 
 upon his own excellent domestic arrangements, on the 
 browner hair and softer eyes of his own Married Life wait- 
 ing for him in the quiet Brackenhurst future. He came 
 home, less bored, but thoughtful, and, next day, spoke to his 
 mother seriously. He said that surely a year was long 
 enough for Laura to fuss about with a trousseau. He said 
 he hated dilly-dallying in this way. Laura didn't seem to 
 understand how a man felt. How much longer did she 
 propose to spin out the engagement? 
 
 Mrs. Cloud thought he had better talk to Laura. 
 
 He did. He said to her firmly 
 
 "Whitsuntide." 
 
 "Why, yes, if you like, Justin," said Laura. And he 
 thought that she need not have taken it quite so calmly. 
 One didn't get married every day. ... It was a big 
 thing. . . . But Laura didn't even look at him as she said, 
 "Why, yes, if you like." 
 
 He found suddenly that he had no more to say to her. 
 He took up a book, while she sat beside him, staring into
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 173 
 
 the fire and warming her hands. That was a silent after- 
 noon. 
 
 But when Bellew's letter arrived, with no apologies, but 
 a counter invitation to Justin, she did not fail him. 
 
 The long projected expedition with its cameras and its 
 ropes and its collecting boxes was to set forth that spring 
 with or without Justin but couldn't Justin go? 
 
 Could Justin go? Laura saw the look on his face. 
 Foolishly, knowing he would go, she could not bear to hear 
 him say so. She interposed swiftly, smiling at him in the 
 way he liked 
 
 "Oh, Justin, how jolly. You're going, aren't you? Of 
 course you must go. It '11 be the making of the collection. ' ' 
 
 He looked at her, brightening, but dubious. 
 
 ' ' But Whitsuntide ? We 'd nearly fixed ! ' ' 
 
 She would not let him finish. 
 
 "What does it matter? There 's heaps of time. I '11 look 
 after your mother. You '11 never get such a chance again. ' ' 
 
 "No no. That's true." He tried to speak doubtfully, 
 but he could not help smiling at Laura. He liked Laura. 
 He wished, but it did not occur to him to tell her that he 
 wished, that she could come too. 
 
 "As you say," he permitted himself to be persuaded, 
 "we can get married any time. But a chance like 
 this " 
 
 "Why, of course!" said Laura. 
 
 "And Whitsun would have been a rush anyway. You 
 know, we might have got the whole thing done by now if 
 we'd only thought," he reproached himself and her. "Oh, 
 well next autumn or say Christmas? Christmas is al- 
 ways a slack time. And now about kit " 
 
 Together they looted Gamage's. 
 
 For the history of the next four months I refer you to 
 Mr. and Mrs. Albert Edward Kimpton, who lived in the 
 brick cottage, darkened with honeysuckle and wild fuchsia, 
 where earwigs dropped friendily on to your shoulder as
 
 174 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 you stooped your way down a step into the dark little post 
 office to buy peppermints or ask for letters. Albert de- 
 livered the letters in the morning, but in the afternoon you 
 bought them from Mrs. Kimpton at the price of a gossip. 
 Albert Edward can bear witness that there was generally 
 a picture postcard for Miss Laura, who had got into the 
 way of meeting him at the gate, on the same day that he had 
 to go up to the Priory with a letter which was not every 
 week: and Mrs. Kimpton can tell you just how often Mrs. 
 Cloud drove up in the pony cart at three o'clock to fetch 
 groceries, and met Miss Laura in the doorway buying her 
 grandfather his stamps. 
 
 The months worked out, I think, though I have forgotten 
 Mrs. Kimpton 's figures, at a letter a fortnight to Mrs. 
 Cloud and a postcard in ten days to Laura, besides the 
 stray windfalls in the way of enclosures, generally oologi- 
 cal, that supplemented, though Mrs. Kimpton could not 
 know it, Laura's parish church interiors. 
 
 They wished, Mrs. Cloud and Laura, that he could have 
 written more regularly, but of course it was his holiday. 
 Once there was a gap of three weeks and five days. But 
 when the letter came it was "so chatty" as Aunt Adela 
 said (there was never anything in Justin's letters that you 
 could not read aloud) that it would have been churlish to 
 remonstrate, and indeed they did not expect long letters: 
 they merely wished sometimes to themselves, never to each 
 other, that that oh, his letters were most interesting but 
 
 but They wanted a woman 's letter, you see, and he 
 
 was a masculine man. He gave them neatly written facts 
 about scenery and the heights of cliffs, and they wanted 
 him, himself, his thoughts talking letters. And though 
 they rejoiced to each other that he should be enjoying him- 
 self so much, they wanted to be missed. They wanted an 
 inquiry or two. 
 
 Justin, opening his eyes at them, would have pointed 
 out with perfect justice, that they told him all about them- 
 selves when they wrote in their turn. What was the use
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 175 
 
 of saying ' ' How are you ? ' ' when he knew how they were ? 
 Besides he did not pretend to be a letter-writer. He wrote 
 whenever there was anything to tell them. That day when 
 he and Bellew had got the photograph of the gannet's nest, 
 and the rope had slipped, and he had nearly gone whacking 
 into the sea three hundred feet below why, he had written 
 at once. That had been a near shave if they liked! Yes, 
 he was having the time of his life. He wished it were not 
 so nearly over. Only another fortnight. Bellew had to 
 be in town again in June. 
 
 After that epistle, and the extremely vivid nightmare 
 that followed it, in which Justin dangled like a spider at 
 the end of a rope that Laura could not hold because she 
 had got eggs in one hand and Bellew, looking exactly like 
 Oliver Seton, was cutting off the other with a palette knife, 
 it was not surprising that she should have a pang when, 
 coming up to lunch at the Priory, a perturbed maid met 
 her with 
 
 "A telegram, Miss Laura, and the boy wanting an 
 answer. The mistress is down the village." 
 
 "It's from Mr. Justin, I expect. I'd better open it," 
 said Laura. 
 
 She read and re-read it with a puzzled face, and the 
 maid watched her. Telegrams were rare in Brackenhurst. 
 
 "Where has Mrs. Cloud gone, did you say?" she asked 
 hurriedly. "No, there's no answer. I wonder if I'd bet- 
 ter try and find her?" She was speaking half to herself 
 and half to the maid. "What's the time? It's nearly 
 lunch-time, isn't it? No no, it can wait." And then, as 
 the maid, an old and trusted one, was leaving the room, 
 "Mary, don't don't tell Mrs. Cloud. I mean, I'll give 
 her this. I'll tell her I opened it." 
 
 Left to herself she stood nervously fingering the paper 
 form, her eyes on the clock. She wished Justin were at 
 home. She wished it were in Justin's safe hands. How 
 did one break things to people?.. . . It would be such an 
 awful shock. . Poor Mrs. Cloud ! . . She looked out of
 
 176 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 the window. No sign as yet, on the long drive, of the pony 
 cart and poor Mrs. Cloud! 
 
 She turned back into the room and, struck by a sudden 
 idea, knelt down and pulled at the pile of volumes whose 
 place, since time was, had been under the what-not in the 
 corner by the door. Out they came dustily, Bible, Nursery 
 Rhyme-book, Hymns Ancient and Modern and, delight of 
 her childhood, the photograph album with the plush cor- 
 ners and the clasps. She opened it and turned the pages 
 till she found the picture that she sought. 
 
 Such a bright face! . . . But for the chin, the weak 
 chin, it might have been Justin. . . . The lips too, were 
 fuller, but how like Justin! . . . Poor boy poor man 
 and, oh, poor Mrs. Cloud! . . . 
 
 She put away the book again and as she did so heard 
 the sound of wheels and Mrs. Cloud's voice at the threshold. 
 
 "In the morning-room? Thanks, Mary." And then, 
 in apology, "My dear, I'm afraid I've kept you waiting." 
 
 Laura spoke breathlessly, in a sudden panic 
 
 ' ' Mrs. Cloud the boy wanted an answer. I had to open 
 it. There's been a telegram," 
 
 "Justin?" cried Mrs. Cloud instantly. 
 
 r< No. No." 
 
 Then Mrs. Cloud turned white. 
 
 "Not John?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 Mrs. Cloud sat down as if she had suddenly no strength. 
 But her voice was steady as she said "Give me the tele- 
 gram," and her hand was steady as she took it. She even 
 said "Thank you, my dear." She was awful to Laura 
 in that moment. Eager young sympathy shrank back re- 
 buked before gentle Mrs. Cloud, sitting quietly in her 
 chair. She dared not speak. She could only stand and 
 wait till the silence that had come into the room like a 
 spirit should have passed. Once indeed it was a most 
 piteous sound she heard a little faint inarticulate moan, 
 and turned quickly; but Mrs. Cloud's face was like a stone
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 177 
 
 face, and she did not stir under Laura's anxious eyes. 
 Yet when the maid knocked at last and entered with her, 
 ''Lunch is served, ma'am," Laura marvelled to see her 
 rouse herself and speak 
 
 "Mary, tell Robert I want the carriage. At once. And 
 pack me a bag, please. I have to go up to town for two or 
 three nights. ' ' And then she turned to Laura with even a 
 little smile for her obvious distress. "It's all right, my 
 dear. Run and have your lunch." 
 
 Laura did not want any lunch. Laura knew that Mrs. 
 Cloud ought not to go up to town unaccompanied, and man- 
 aged, timidly, to say so. 
 
 But Mrs. Cloud, scribbling an address in her notebook, 
 paid no heed to her or to the maid who ruled her in her 
 daily life, and drove away from their bewilderment at last, 
 looking bowed and unfamiliar and very old a little old 
 woman carved in ivory. 
 
 "She's got her black on. She hasn't worn that cloak 
 these ten years," said the maid. And then, with a gasp 
 "Miss Laura, what is it? I I been with her twenty 
 years. ' ' 
 
 Laura judged it wisest to tell her. 
 
 "It's bad news, Mary. Mr. Justin's brother " 
 
 "Mr. John?" 
 
 "He died yesterday."
 
 CHAPTER XXII 
 
 WHEN Justin, a fortnight later, heard the story of that 
 afternoon, he was very angry with Laura. Letting his 
 mother go alone ! In that state of trouble ! Why, a child 
 might have known better ! 
 
 ' ' She wouldn 't let me, Justin ! If you 'd seen her ! One 
 couldn't move her. She was like iron." 
 
 "Mother! Like iron!" Justin was angry and pitiful 
 at once. "You ought to have insisted," he said shortly, 
 and his tone added, "I thought I could have trusted you." 
 
 She was miserable at his displeasure, although she did 
 not resent it. She guessed that it must ease him to vent 
 in any way his regret for his own absence; but she knew, 
 too, that whatever he thought, she had not failed Mrs. 
 Cloud. 
 
 "I think You know, I've thought, Justin," she 
 
 tried to explain, "that she she was afraid of what she 
 might find. She didn't want any one to see to be able to 
 think badly of him. I believe I'd have felt that way 
 too." 
 
 "All the same, you ought to have gone." But he spoke 
 more gently. Laura often thought of things that had not 
 occurred to him. Then he went off at a tangent: 
 ' ' Think badly ! What else can one think ? Do you realize 
 that he left Mother, without a line, twenty years and 
 living all the time within a railway journey of her? He's 
 my brother, and he's dead but I can't forgive him. 
 Never shall. The callousness! It's it's inconceivable!" 
 
 "Why did he go orginally?" 
 
 ' ' Some row with my father. A cheque. A beastly busi- 
 ness. He bolted to America. But you'd think later on 
 
 178
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 179 
 
 when he came back when things had blown over when 
 he'd found his feet " 
 
 "Perhaps he couldn't. Perhaps he was ashamed." 
 
 "Then Coral should have made him. Any decent 
 woman but what can you expect?" And he looked with 
 deep disfavour at the girl in showy mourning sitting with 
 Mrs. Cloud at the other end of the lawn. 
 
 For Mrs. Cloud had not returned alone. In the dingy 
 room to which they had carried John Cloud when his un- 
 steady feet had been knocked from under him by a passing 
 car, she had found a young woman with an old face, and a 
 little big-eyed boy at sight of whom she caught her breath, 
 not knowing for the moment whether it were John or 
 Justin come back to her across the years. But his name, 
 the mother told her, between sobs and businesslike explana- 
 tions of how she had found the address and what she had 
 done about the funeral, was Timothy. She herself she 
 poured it all out with an utter frankness that touched Mrs. 
 Cloud was Coral, Johnnie's wife. Married five years 
 ago Timothy was three called after Johnnie's father, 
 Johnnie said and things had just begun to look up 
 they had got a joint engagement oh, yes, on the stage 
 for years. She had got him his first job and now and 
 
 now No, he had never stirred after they brought him 
 
 in. 
 
 So Mrs. Cloud, when she had seen her son and had buried 
 him, gathered together all that he had left her and went 
 back to her home. It was a nine-days-wonder for Bracken- 
 hurst, all eyes and ears and enquiries. 
 
 "Most charitable of poor Mrs. Cloud, most Christian 
 but, oh ; my dear ! have you seen the young woman ? Hand- 
 some, of course she would be. But the voice the clothes 
 the style (yes, we must call at once) unspeakable! 
 Makes one so sorry for dear Mrs. Cloud ! ' ' 
 
 But Coral, who perhaps had not met with too much 
 kindness in her life, revealed a gratefully truculent capac- 
 ity for protecting not only herself but the mother-in-law
 
 180 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 who was good to her. Mrs. Cloud had to smile sometimes 
 and come to the rescue with a ' ' My dear ! ' ' that, though it 
 checked her, never seemed to hurt Coral 's feelings. Brack- 
 enhurst, retiring in confusion, marvelled how well the two 
 hit it off : was reduced to wondering what Mr. Justin Cloud 
 Mr. Cloud now, I suppose would have to say to it all 
 when he arrived. 
 
 Mr. Cloud, as you have heard, had a good deal to say, 
 not to Brackenhurst or to his little worn mother, but to 
 Laura. Justin, it may as well be admitted at once, justi- 
 fied Brackenhurst 's worst hopes. He did not get on with 
 his sister-in-law. 
 
 Now of all Justin's good qualities Laura most admired 
 his broad-minded tolerance of every sin and foible of hu- 
 manity that did not get on his nerves. To listen to him 
 afterwards, when Brackenhurst had been to tea and gossip, 
 divided her between intense admiration of his generosity 
 and a guilty sense of her own meaner nature. 
 
 Second cups would be filling, as a rule, and cake plates 
 emptying, and the Brackenhurst that had been invited 
 would be discussing in detail the Brackenhurst that had 
 not, before Justin would remember that it was tea-time 
 and make his entrance. Laura loved his entrances. He 
 would pause in the doorway to survey the room, his shy 
 smile comically contradicted by his air (quite unconscious, 
 to be sure) of well knowing that his arrival must always 
 be an event, and, largely beaming, would await attention. 
 That accorded, he would move forward with dignity and 
 deliberation he was always deliberate and so achieve a 
 seat. He would refuse food from any hand, which always 
 embitters a woman; because he had come, not to enjoy 
 himself, but to please his mother and help her with her 
 tea-party. He did help her, too, as a son does by being a 
 a son and good-looking and too big for the room, but on 
 the whole he was perhaps more impressive than stimulating. 
 Conversationally he needed room to turn in and when the
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 181 
 
 room was full of Brackenhurst, petticoated Bracken- 
 hurst You understand? He knew, at any rate, that 
 
 his mother understood. 
 
 But he was quite ready to listen. He would sit back in 
 his arm-chair, his grave attentive gaze fixed on each visitor 
 as she spoke, not speaking himself, but, it could be felt, 
 giving them their chance, dispassionately giving them their 
 chance to live up to his standard. 
 
 They seldom did. But they talked, because he made 
 them nervous, faster than ever and a little more shrilly 
 and foolishly and indiscreetly than they would otherwise 
 have done : and were vexed with themselves when they got 
 home. 
 
 And Justin, looking more than ever like an intelligent 
 little boy at a wedding, would ponder their alarums and 
 excursions as he made up for his tea at dinner-time, and 
 finally break out 
 
 ' ' What 's Mrs. Gedge got her knife into the Mouldes for ? 
 Quite harmless, aren't they?" 
 
 "Oh, quite." Mrs. Cloud would hesitate. "But, of 
 
 course Oh, well, you know, chapel people and now 
 
 Robin Gedge wants to marry Annabel. It 's rather hard on 
 the vicarage. ' ' 
 
 ' ' Chapel ! We 're not living in the 'fifties ! What 's that 
 got to do with it?" 
 
 "No, of course but it isn't only that. Annabel I 
 must say I 'm disappointed in Annabel. Oh no real harm, 
 but frivolous, you know, and such a crowd of boys about 
 her. A girl shouldn't make herself conspicuous. Mrs. 
 Gedge only hinted that pale blue taffeta was not suitable 
 for a Mothers' Meeting, and Annabel was quite rude, I 
 believe. ' ' 
 
 "And a jolly good thing too! What has it got to do 
 with Mrs. Gedge? I do think women are the limit, you 
 know not you, Mother, of course! But imagine any man 
 imagine me dictating to Laura what she's to wear or not
 
 182 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 to wear! And 'chapel people'! Isn't it petty?" He 
 turned to his Echo, who always stayed to dinner on party 
 days. 
 
 "I thought you didn't like Annabel?" Echo failed him 
 for once. 
 
 "Like? Never see the girl. Don't want to. Can't 
 stand her. It's the principle. Chapel!! It's a free 
 country. What right have you or I, or Mrs. Gedge for 
 that matter, to dictate to Annabel Moulde? If people are 
 to set up their personal prejudices as a standard for their 
 neighbours D'you see what I mean?" 
 
 Laura quite saw what he meant ; but she had also seen the 
 taffeta frock. She could not help sympathizing with Mrs. 
 Gedge and saying so. Laura was always finding herself 
 put into the position of defending some one to whom she 
 was indifferent : it was depressing. . . . She wished she had 
 Justin's ready tolerance. . . . 
 
 She was so sure of this tolerance of his that she was the 
 more distressed by his attitude to his sister-in-law. If 
 Justin didn't like her there must be someting radically 
 wrong with Coral, though she herself had not detected it. 
 She couldn't help, guiltily, being fascinated by the vulgar 
 little body. She liked her brisk self-confidence, her free 
 humour, her fund of anecdote. She even liked the accent, 
 elusive yet undeniable, lingering in her decisive public 
 voice. It suited Coral. But it made Justin shudder be- 
 hind his coffee-cup in what had once been the cloistral and 
 dedicate silence of the breakfast-room. The most unfortu- 
 nate part of the whole unfortunate business was that Coral 
 liked Justin, liked him very much, and said so repeatedly to 
 Laura, to Mrs. Cloud, and to Justin himself, particularly to 
 Justin himself. He found it trying. 
 
 She called him 'dear' and took him for walks, and asked 
 him to fasten her bracelets for her. She used strong scent. 
 She got at his newspaper before he came down and told him 
 all the news before he had time to read it for himself. He 
 was politely conversational for the two first mornings, but
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 183 
 
 by the third he was reduced to the acquiescive monosyllable 
 which always meant, always had meant, as Mrs. Cloud or 
 Laura could have told the woman, that he did not wish to 
 be importuned. But Coral greeted the indication with a 
 crow of laughter and told him that he did her good. He 
 reminded her so of his brother. "Never saw such a like- 
 ness. It might be Johnnie himself just like Johnnie 
 after a night out. Grunts was all you could ever get out of 
 Johnnie then poor Johnnie ! ' ' And so, with the easy emo- 
 tion of the profession, mopped her eyes with an imitation 
 Brussels lace handkerchief in memory of Johnnie. 
 
 Justin looked round him with an almost passionate long- 
 ing for Laura. But Laura, of course, was never at the 
 Priory for breakfast. 
 
 Gentle Mrs. Cloud was unaccountably indifferent to 
 Coral's glaring misdemeanours. Mrs. Cloud, with her 
 grandson on her knee, could forgive Coral her clothes and 
 her manners, and which was more her matrimonial au- 
 dacity itself: could listen with a kind of sorrowful content 
 to the semi-cockney voice telling stories, the suitable stories 
 Coral was no fool of poor Johnnie. Coral had been 
 good to Johnnie and it had not been easy to be good to 
 Johnnie: that appeared more clearly than Coral, so care- 
 fully no fool, could dream, or than Justin and Laura 
 realized; though they, too, were alert, intent on shielding 
 Mrs. Cloud from crudities. But Mrs. Cloud listened, and 
 learned all that she was not meant to know, and was kind 
 to Coral, and with that strange reticence of hers never said 
 aloud: "But if he had written, if he had only written, 
 to his own mother ! ' ' but instead, with her soft smile 
 
 ' ' I am glad he had you, my dear. ' ' 
 
 "If I'd known " began Coral once, and stopped her- 
 self. She intended saying that if she had known what a 
 Mrs. Cloud could be she would have sent her husband to 
 his home long ago. But she realized that even Mrs. Cloud 
 would not bear the suggestion of her son returning to her 
 by another woman's good leave. And she had fallen in
 
 184. FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 love, as every one fell in love, with quiet Mrs. Cloud. 
 
 But behold Coral now, the daughter-in-law, the wife 
 picked up in the far country, installed at Brackenhurst and 
 on her best behaviour ; but dying for some one to talk to ! 
 
 Of course there was Laura. There was always Laura. 
 Justin interposed Laura between himself and his sister- 
 in-law, much as you hold an umbrella slant-wise between 
 you and the wind. 
 
 Coral did not object. Laura interested her. Coral, who 
 did not know the meaning of the word reserve, except in 
 the professional sense of keeping your salary to yourself, 
 conquered Laura's hesitancies and reticencies by ignoring 
 them. She inveigled her into bedroom conclaves and long 
 walks and talks: and Laura, intrigued, half hostile, found 
 herself committed to intimacy, and found it pleasant. 
 She had no women friends. Annabel and the vicar's 
 daughters she did not like, and the Cloud cousins, Rhoda 
 and Lucy, had but just come home from school. Coral 
 could not be called a kindred spirit, but she was shrewd 
 and sociable : beneath her flagrancies Laura learned to like 
 and respect her, and to think that in a month or two, when 
 
 they got to know each other better But Coral cut 
 
 short the rest. Coral, by the end of the week, had laid all 
 before her as far as her own private affairs and love affairs 
 were concerned and was taking it for granted that Laura 
 would respond. 
 
 And Laura, against her will and her dignity and her 
 acute consciousness of what Justin would say if he knew, 
 did respond. She did not know how it happened ; but she 
 found herself talking to Coral, talking about everything 
 under the sun and Justin. She had never discussed 
 Justin with any one in all her life. It was a curious sen- 
 sation, sacrilegious but enjoyable. She did not realize that 
 it was Coral's doing. But Coral had not been a week at 
 Brackenhurst before she decided that Laura was in love 
 with Justin and needed a little help. A born matchmaker, 
 she had resolved to give it.
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 185 
 
 "You never thought of taking on my brother-in-law, 
 I suppose?" she said one day to Laura. And then, 
 impressively "I believe you could get him if you 
 tried." 
 
 Laura looked puzzled. 
 
 "What do you mean, Coral get him?" 
 
 "Marry him." 
 
 ' ' But of course. We 're engaged. ' ' 
 
 "Engaged?" For once Coral had no words. Laura 
 laughed. 
 
 "Didn't you know? I thought you did. I suppose we 
 took it for granted you knew. One does, somehow. ' ' 
 
 "But you can't be engaged." Coral was quite an- 
 noyed. 
 
 "What d'you mean can't?" said Laura sharply. But 
 as Coral hesitated, she added ' ' Oh, you mean I 'm not good 
 enough for him." She flushed. "I know that. You 
 needn't rub it in." 
 
 Coral was genuinely shocked. 
 
 "Not good enough? What utter rot! As if I ever 
 dreamed of such a thing! As if a woman weren't always 
 too good for a man. It's Justin who's lucky, I should 
 say!" 
 
 Laura put aside the grossness of that insincerity with a 
 polite smile. 
 
 "What did you mean then, that we couldn't be en- 
 gaged?" 
 
 "Only that you don't behave as if you were. When I 
 think of me and Johnnie, let alone my best boys goodness 
 me!" 
 
 Laura thought that she ought to be offended; but she 
 could not be. Coral's views were too interesting and she 
 was too obviously unconscious that her interest could be 
 unwelcome. 
 
 "Well, we are, anyway " 
 
 Coral enveloped her in an embrace. She looked genu- 
 inely delighted.
 
 186 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 "Good business, dearie! But I say, I must chaff Justin 
 for not telling me ! ' ' 
 
 "Oh Coral, don't! You'll make him squirm. Haven't 
 you noticed how he hates fuss?" she ended delicately, 
 afraid of offending Coral. But Coral did not seem dis- 
 turbed. 
 
 "Yes. Aren't men quaint? I had a lot of trouble be- 
 fore I cured Johnnie. Justin does remind me so of John- 
 nie sometimes. That type needs a heap of managing. 
 When I marry again " 
 
 "Again?" 
 
 Coral bridled, up in arms in an instant. 
 
 "How old d'you think I am then? Sixty?" 
 
 "Oh, no! oh, no!" Laura, perplexed, tried to smooth 
 down the angry little woman. But Coral, touched on a 
 tender spot, was not to be pacified. 
 
 "Fifty? Forty? I tell you I'll tell you I'm thirty. 
 That's what I am. Not a day more. And Tim was acci- 
 dental. Quite. If I 'd had my way Of course a child 
 
 takes it out of you and touring on the top! I played 
 Aladdin at the time I was nursing him. It wasn't as easy 
 as you'd think either. My word, how that kid used to 
 howl! My dressing-room was star, you see right off the 
 stage. We used to have to arrange with the conductor for 
 incidental music whenever he woke up. Can't trust land- 
 ladies will give 'em gin when your back's turned. Well, 
 as I say I may be thirty and there's Tim and the mourn- 
 ing; but made-up I don't look a day over twenty, I give 
 you may word. Why shouldn't I get married again?" 
 
 Laura fidgeted, and Coral reddened anew. She had a 
 terrible trick of accusing you of thinking that which, as a 
 matter of inconvenient fact, you had been thinking. 
 
 "If you think I wasn't fond of poor old John well, 
 you're wrong. But he's dead and I'm alive. And once 
 you've had a husband, you know " 
 
 Laura obviously didn't. 
 
 "Well mind, I'm not saying it's only habit but a
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 187 
 
 man's like a fur coat. Not absolutely necessary, but once 
 you've had one you can't get on without. You feel lost. 
 You want some one to look after. I'd never go wrong, 
 you know. I'm not that sort. A girl who can't control 
 herself makes me sick. I've seen too much of it. And 
 they call it love! But give me a husband! Not that I'd 
 live on a man even if he were my husband. I own myself, 
 you know. I pay my way. Why I've earned my keep 
 ever since I was twelve. Up to six-ten a week I've been, 
 and down to eighteen bob and provide your shoes and 
 gloves. But I've always kept myself and John too some- 
 times ; though he hated it, poor Johnnie. But there it was, 
 you see. I could play anything from Little Eva to The 
 Worst Woman in London. But, John, he wasn't much good. 
 He could act straight parts all right, and of course I always 
 got him cast for earls when I knew the management ; but he 
 wasn't much use for anything else. Too much the gentle- 
 man, you know. And a joint engagement it's cheaper 
 one way living together; but they beat you down. Still, 
 it's better than living alone. It's hell, living alone " 
 
 That was always the burden of the conversations with 
 which she beguiled their long hours together. For Mrs. 
 Cloud was pathetically absorbed in Timothy, and Justin 
 had grown adroit in calculating and evading his sister-in- 
 law's whereabouts. Laura, as Mrs. Cloud told Aunt Adela 
 in an apologetic call, was invaluable. She got on so well 
 with Coral. Indeed, as she said one day to her son, she 
 was doing Coral good. Hadn't Justin noticed how much 
 quieter poor dear Coral had grown in manner ? 
 
 But neither Mrs. Cloud nor Justin noticed how much 
 good Coral was doing Laura. For Laura, doing her duty 
 with wide eyes and ears and mouth, drank in knowledge 
 that had never before come her away: was introduced to 
 facts facts as crude and obvious as bread-and-cheese 
 and that, often enough, in a fashion that would have ap- 
 palled Aunt Adela and would have been incomprehensible 
 to Mrs. Cloud.
 
 188 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 For Coral, inevitably, sprinkled her conversation with 
 tales of the trade, occasionally funny, invariably coarse 
 tales so complicatedly Rabelaisian that Laura, that seeker 
 after knowledge, would wrinkle her brows and ask ques- 
 tions, and Coral would double up with laughter and some- 
 times explain. But the explanations were even more 
 extraordinary than the stories. Now and then she carried 
 a perplexity to Justin. He, in his sensible fashion, al- 
 ways explained the point that would have horrified Aunt 
 Adela, and, though he laughed, agreed with her that it was 
 not really funny. Laura was satisfied. She liked Justin. 
 She knew where she was with Justin. He never left his 
 sentences unfinished. She was superior one day when 
 Coral began, as usual, to tease her. 
 
 "Oh, I understand that now. I asked Justin." 
 
 "You didn't! You haven't? Really, Laura!" For 
 once Coral was shocked. ' ' I never heard of such a thing ! 
 
 Haven't you any sense of decency? To ask a man ! 
 
 I wonder you're not ashamed." And then, with a giggle, 
 "What did he say?" 
 
 "Oh, he just told me," said Laura, puzzled at Coral's 
 heat. 
 
 "Didn't you fall through the floor? My dear, you 
 
 mustn't! I can't tell you things if you Oh, really, 
 
 Laura, you're the limit!" Coral was divided between 
 laughter and real annoyance. 
 
 "But I always ask Justin everything," Laura remon- 
 strated. "Why shouldn't I? Of course I shouldn't 
 dream of telling Aunt Adela. But Justin ! ' ' 
 
 And Coral, that typical stage mixture of frankness and 
 prudery, was forced to realize that she was entirely and 
 unsuspiciously sincere. 
 
 "D'you tell him anything?" she gasped. 
 
 "Well, who else can I ask? He was at Oxford, you 
 know. He knows an awful lot." 
 
 "He must be a decent sort! My word!" Coral was 
 impressed for once.
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 189 
 
 "He's Justin," said Laura placidly. 
 
 And Coral, the married woman, the woman of her world, 
 admitted to herself, with a laugh and a touch of envy, that 
 there were things in Brackenhurst undreamed of in her 
 philosophy, and that their names were Laura Valentine and 
 Henry Justin Cloud. Also, with admirable wisdom, that 
 she had much better leave them to work out their own sal- 
 vation in their own amazing way. 
 
 But you don 't suppose that she did ? Surely the resolve 
 was enough to stamp her an unusual woman. You cannot 
 expect her to abide by it. 
 
 Such a fascinating pie as she had found, too, at Bracken- 
 hurst and so badly in need of a stir : and she born with the 
 very finger for it, the crooked, enquiring, blunt-tipped 
 finger of the artist in such cookery! And Brackenhurst, 
 save for this godsend of a pie, was such a dull place to be 
 resting in, though she owed Johnnie's folk the visit and it 
 was doing Timothy good that, with an ache at her heart, 
 she realized. She asked herself sometimes if she should 
 ever dare take Timothy from this, so obviously his own 
 place. His cheeks were so rosy, and his nurse so com- 
 petent, and his poor little manners so much improved that 
 she felt at times half afraid of him or herself. She could 
 not see this new Timothy with her any more in lodgings 
 and dressing-rooms and trains. And yet, how could she 
 stay on indefinitely at the Priory? She who was home- 
 sick already for her own familiar world of bustle and 
 bright lights, and scent, and dirt, and chocolate, and men, 
 and overwork. Brackenhurst for a week-end was as good 
 as a picture palace; but she had been there a month now 
 and there was nothing in the world to do but talk to 
 Laura. 
 
 She thanked her stars for Laura. She admired Laura, 
 would have given her an introduction to a manager with 
 hearty goodwill. It amused her to shock Laura, and yet 
 Laura's wondering eyes could hurt her. She had a queer 
 tenderness for her, as for a child : and yet she did not spare
 
 190 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 her. She told herself that it did Laura good to jump. 
 And the relief of reckless speech was great. 
 
 "What a queer mark!" said Laura to her one day. 
 Coral had slipped off her blouse and was trying on a half- 
 made bodice. Laura, hovering round her with pins and 
 scissors, had noticed a white three-cornered scar on Coral's 
 bare shoulder. 
 
 "That?" Coral laughed. "Johnnie did that. Poor 
 Johnnie! How upset he was next day!" 
 
 "How did it happen?" said Laura. "It's quite a bad 
 mark. Keep still." 
 
 "Chair-leg," said Coral, without emotion. 
 
 "What?" Laura's pins dropped from her hands. She 
 stared at Coral with wide, incredulous eyes. 
 
 Coral looked at her with curious, amused detachment. 
 
 "Do you mean to say," she drawled, "that you didn't 
 know what was wrong with Johnnie ? ' ' 
 
 "Oh, Coral!" Laura's great eyes were eloquent. But 
 Coral shrugged off the idea of sympathy. She was quite 
 genuinely matter-of-fact. 
 
 "My dear, he didn't mean it. He couldn't help it. 
 They're not themselves, you know. They don't know what 
 they're doing. Johnnie was like a mad bull sometimes 
 poor Johnnie!" 
 
 ' ' But but he was a gentleman ! ' ' cried Laura, in spite 
 of herself. 
 
 "A gentleman's just a man when he's drunk," said Coral 
 shrewdly, ' ' same as most other times swears the same and 
 smells the same." 
 
 "But a gentleman doesn't get drunk," protested Laura. 
 "At least- " 
 
 Coral laughed. 
 
 "Well, I'm perfectly certain Justin never has." 
 
 ' ' No, he looks as if he hadn 't. I 'd think more of him if 
 he had. He looks as if he 'd never been drunk in his life 
 or kissed either. Except you." She laughed again. 
 "And that doesn't count. You don't count, you know."
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 191 
 
 She glanced sideways at Laura as she slipped off the bodice 
 and turned to her own work again. 
 
 In silence Laura cut and threaded and knotted a length 
 of cotton. They were sitting at their needlework. Coral, 
 in search of amusement, no reader, but as expert a needle- 
 woman as ever wasted exquisite stitchery on bad material, 
 had insisted on inspecting Laura's bottom drawer, had cried 
 out against the serviceable longcloths and calico buttons, 
 and had at last, with peremptory good nature, declared that 
 she would attend to Laura's trousseau herself. Laura must 
 send to some pet shop of Coral's for patterns, "the best 
 value in London, dirt cheap, you couldn't tell their lace 
 from real!" And while Laura thanked her, but was 
 firm against Tubbin and Spinks and coloured underclothes, 
 Mrs. Cloud had slipped away in her mouse-like fashion 
 (indeed, they had not known that she was with them or 
 listening) and had come back again from a rummage of 
 her stores to appease them with a roll of finest lawn, 
 smelling of orris-root, and little bundles of lace from Italy. 
 After that the trousseau increased on the filmiest of lines 
 and apace. Sometimes, as they sat working, they even 
 talked about the wedding-dress. But then Coral would 
 talk about anything! . . . There was never any holding 
 Coral. ... A baffling woman, Coral. . . . She would chat- 
 ter strange things till Laura was restless and excited, and 
 then, with a word, a stray phrase, she would be a cold 
 wind, bursting all the many-coloured bubbles she had 
 blown for Laura, permitting herself some such kindly in- 
 solence as now, when she said 
 
 "You! But you don't count, you know!" 
 
 And, as I tell you, it took Laura those long minutes to 
 adjust her needle and thread before she answered 
 
 "It's you who don't understand. Justin and I aren't 
 like that. We we don't care about that sort of thing. 
 It's silly!" 
 
 Coral surveyed her, made up her mind about her at last. 
 
 "Poor old Laura!" she said deliberately.
 
 192 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 Laura flushed angrily. She stared at Coral, chin lifted, 
 with half-shut, indifferent eyes the look that was her 
 shield in danger. 
 
 "I don't know what you mean," said Laura icily. 
 
 ' ' Don 't you ? ' ' Coral bent placidly over her embroidery 
 frame. In the pause her needle made tiny, explosive 
 sounds as it popped in and out of the taut silk. She looked 
 up at last to find that Laura had risen, was standing over 
 her. Behind her fierceness she had a curious air of alarm. 
 
 "Well?" said Coral, with lazy amusement. 
 
 And then Laura's haughtiness melted rather pitifully 
 into childish, bewildered anger. 
 
 "You talk so! I hate the way you talk. About us. 
 
 You hint You're always hinting! What is it you 
 
 mean? Do you think ? Do you imagine ?" She 
 
 drew a difficult breath. "Oh, I think you're a perfect 
 beast!" cried Laura fiercely. 
 
 She flamed out of the room : and, for the rest of the day, 
 would not look at her, would not speak to her. 
 
 And Coral, who liked her, watched her with those two 
 shrewd, bright blue eyes of hers and laughed a little and 
 shook her head and said to herself once again 
 
 "Poor old Laura!"
 
 CHAPTER XXIII 
 
 "You don't count." 
 
 Coral's words, her look, her laughter above all, her 
 kindly, contemptuous laughter haunted Laura. 
 
 Since the day of her engagement she had been aware, 
 underneath her happiness, of certain inadequacies, fallings 
 short in herself or was it possible? in Justin. Prepos- 
 terous ! She heaped scorn upon the notion till it was cov- 
 ered up again, and yet she knew it was there, huddled 
 away in a corner of her mind, ready at a word to shake 
 itself free of its trappings, to confront her, a naked living 
 fact. "You don't count." Coral's three words were 
 more than enough to waken it. She had failed Justin in 
 some way? Was that what Coral meant? Coral, who 
 knew such a lot about men. Coral, who seemed to think 
 that Justin was no more than anybody else, thought it 
 ought to be easy to make him like one better than birds' 
 eggs and books and things. She remembered how Coral 
 had turned on her one day, laughing and angry, saying: 
 "You little fool, why the devil don't you flirt with him?" 
 
 That was all very well, of course, if one were pretty 
 enough and clever enough, a splendid, irresistible sort of 
 person. . . . That sort of thing worked in books. . . . But 
 Laura would like any one to tell her how she was to flirt 
 with Justin? How to start even? ... It seemed a hope- 
 less business. . . . Besides besides she didn't want to 
 . . . she would just feel a fool. . . . And that was what 
 Coral meant, she supposed, by not counting. ... Or was 
 it ? ... When Coral laughed oh, Coral got on her nerves ! 
 . . . She wished Coral had never come to Brackenhurst. 
 . . . Coral and life were so mysterious. . . . She thought 
 that being grown-up was very strange and difficult. . . . 
 
 193
 
 194. FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 One day as she helped Justin with his precise, delightful 
 task of gumming labels on his latest finds, she broke out 
 suddenly, guided by an irresistible impulse 
 
 "Justin, I do count, don't I?" 
 
 He was doing things with a strip of paper and a paste 
 brush. 
 
 "Here, hold this down, will you? No, not there, that's 
 not pasted yet where it's curling. What were you say- 
 ing?" 
 
 "You wouldn't say I didn't count, would you?" she 
 revised it. "I do come next to your mother, don't I?" 
 And then, quickly, "What is it scissors?" 
 
 "No, the knife, the black handle. Yes, of course you 
 count. What's the matter? Why not?" And then, as 
 the subject dawned on him "My dear child, as if one 
 made lists of that sort of thing and marked people off!" 
 
 She laughed. 
 
 "I do. Shall I tell you my list?" 
 
 He did not answer. That was his way of rebuking van- 
 ity. 
 
 She turned from him, disheartened. So silly of her to 
 expect to get anything out of Justin. But she was not at 
 the door before he called to her pleasantly enough 
 
 "I say, hold this again, will you, please? I'm all 
 gummy." 
 
 She came back, and for half an hour sat beside him in 
 silence, listening to his breathing, watching his intent face, 
 helping him when she could. And as she sat thus, all he 
 had meant to her since her childhood came overwhelmingly 
 into her mind. She was flooded with strange thoughts. 
 
 She thought: 
 
 It must be true that I don't count. . . . There must be 
 something lacking in me or else I could make Justin look 
 up and want to talk to me. ... I'm engaged to him. . . . 
 Why can't I put my arms round his neck and say "You 
 must do what / want now ? ' ' 
 
 She thought again:
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 195 
 
 It is queer ... I'm so near to Justin. . . . His hand 
 touches mine when I pass him things . . . and yet all the 
 time we're in two different worlds. . . . He doesn't know 
 that. . . . Sometimes I think he doesn 't know anything. . . . 
 
 She thought: 
 
 It hurts me to be with him, and it hurts me not to be 
 with him ... it hurts me more every day. . . . And yet 
 this pain I wouldn't miss it. ... It's doing things to 
 me all day long. ... It's making me grow. ... I feel so 
 wise. . . . Justin would say "conceit" if I told him, but 
 it isn't conceit. ... I am awfully wise. ... I know Jus- 
 tin all through. . . . He 's just ordinary to Coral and every 
 one. He's just ordinary to himself. . . . But I see right 
 inside what God sees. It's like being God to love a person 
 so. 
 
 And then this poor, triumphant, heaven-scaling humanity 
 stumbled and lost foothold and fell back again to Mother 
 Earth. ... I wish she thought wistfully I wish he could 
 want, sometimes, to kiss me. . . . 
 
 But at that she caught her breath in a sort of horror at 
 herself. What had come to her? She could not under- 
 stand herself any more. She felt helpless and despairing 
 and yet filled with faint, wicked happiness. She looked 
 across at Justin's calm profile with a childish, mad impulse 
 of appeal. If only he had time to help her ! . . . And yet, 
 of course, she could never even tell him that she wanted 
 help. . . . These thoughts would make Justin hate her if 
 he knew. . . . She must not, must never think a thought 
 she could not own to Justin. . . . She must stamp out the 
 incomprehensible feelings that, in spite of herself, were 
 surging over her mind, the feelings that were as beautiful as 
 music and yet, somehow, were wicked. 
 
 All the panic-stricken summer day she struggled like a 
 half-tamed bird to free her child's heart from the thrilling 
 touch, the tightening grip of 'wickedness.' 
 
 She stayed late at the Priory, though she knew, guiltily, 
 that Aunt Adela was away and Gran 'papa would eat a
 
 196 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 lonely supper. But she dreaded the solitary walk home 
 and the quiet evening and the long night of thoughts that 
 lay before her. 
 
 She went off at last with unnecessary last words to Coral 
 and Mrs. Cloud, and glanced back, as she went down the 
 drive, at the friendly house with the lamplight streaming 
 from its big bay windows and Justin's shadow on the 
 blind of his den, as if in leaving it she left behind her, 
 safety. 
 
 The gate clashed at her heels. 
 
 The night was soft, very quiet, neither warm nor cold. 
 There was no star in the sky and her only guide between 
 the vague hedges was the dim earth-shine of the chalk 
 road, stretching out ahead of her like the silvery track of 
 a snail. She pulled her cloak about her, huddling into 
 herself. Her body was warm, but the loneliness of the 
 night had put out cold fingers and touched her throat. 
 She could hear the little human sounds she made, of breath 
 and movement, rippling out and being smothered in that 
 ocean of silence. 
 
 Presently she descended into the deeper darkness of tree- 
 thatched Wisdom Lane, where the banks were steep and a 
 huge chestnut put a period to the run of the brambles. 
 It was half circled by a seat that was unsightly enough in 
 the daytime, littered with paper and orange-peel and the 
 whirled sif tings of the road a wind's dust-pan, a perch 
 for the birds, an urchins' parliament. But at night lovers 
 sat there. 
 
 Laura, who had so often passed by with a smile or a shrug 
 of cool wonder at the ways of 'poor people,' content to 
 court in public, swerved suddenly off the path and into 
 the road, slipping by the dark seat like a shadow. Yet 
 she had, unwillingly, a glimpse of the couple that, since 
 she could remember, always seemed the same, sitting as 
 they always sat, clasped, motionless, the woman's head on 
 the man's breast, the faces grey- white like the road beyond 
 the shadows.
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 197 
 
 Laura, in that glance, half recognized their own maid, 
 doubtfully, as a goodwife eyes a changeling. She knew 
 her common sense told her that at ten o 'clock Ellen would 
 slip through a back door and appear five minutes later, 
 capped and decent and respectful, with a tray and glasses 
 in her hand, and no inexplicable glory on her common 
 face. But at this moment, she, Laura, the mistress, was 
 ignored : was not even seen. She knew that she might pass 
 and repass a dozen times and they would not stir. She 
 was inconsiderable, invisible, impalpable. She did not 
 exist. 
 
 She went her way, humbly, filled with awe and wonder 
 and intolerable envy. "What was this transmuting force, 
 this holy spirit that could draw a magic circle about a 
 housemaid and a groom in which to sit out their hour in a 
 public way, inviolate, divine? . . . What was it? ... 
 What did it mean? . . . What did it all mean? . . . And 
 why should she, Laura, feel herself ignorant, shut out, and 
 desperately lonely? . . . She was of all women fortunate. 
 . . . She was alive. . . . She was engaged to Justin. . . . 
 But this new thing what was it? ... What was it that 
 he and she had not yet found what gift of God that (as 
 she saw with sudden clearness) they could in no wise find, 
 save together? . . . Life and she herself and Justin had 
 become, since the morning, mysterious and mutually inex- 
 plicable. . . . Why was she feeling so strangely ? . . . Why 
 had she to hurry past those enchanted yokels as one proved 
 negligible, incomplete, a half creature? . . . Why was not 
 Justin with her that she might carry herself as one justi- 
 fied, oblivious of the world as the world of her ? . . . 
 
 She came out into the broad road again and again the 
 silence of the wide fields surged in upon her, and her soul 
 clung to her terrified, like a wrecked sailor clinging to a spar. 
 
 She should have asked Justin to come with her. ... If 
 she had asked he would have come. ... It was only that 
 it had not occurred to him. . . . The stubbornness that 
 would ask nothing, that would accept nothing of him that
 
 198 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 was not spontaneous, was receiving its just reward. . . . 
 
 It was such a silence, such a loneliness of soul so ach- 
 ingly intensified by her consciousness of the two behind 
 her in the shadows, that she felt it like a leaden cope press- 
 ing her down, crushing into shapelessness the pitiful re- 
 sistance of her pride. If Justin had come to her then, she 
 could have besieged him like any wanton for the dole of a 
 kind look, of an arm about her shaken body. 
 
 She had come to a standstill in the middle of the road 
 because she could not bear any longer the sound of her own 
 feet running after her: and so waited, impotently, for the 
 passing of a fellow creature or her own mood. And pres- 
 ently, mercifully, the face of the night changed to her. 
 The loneliness faded from it like a veil withdrawn, and 
 with it the sense of isolation that had oppressed her faded 
 too. She was gradually aware of the universal alive-ness 
 of the still world about her. It was as if her late, be- 
 wildered thoughts had evolved some ruthless one who stood 
 beside her, thrusting a torch into the secrets of the deep 
 ditches and shuttered cottages and mist-veiled fields, and, 
 with a heavy hand upon her neck, bowed her forward to 
 peer at what the light revealed. 
 
 And she saw saw the arcades and the galleries of the 
 hedges and how unbelievably full they were of living, 
 mated things: saw the warm round nests and in each a 
 stir of bright eyes and perking crests: saw the day-moths 
 with their flattened wings, asleep upon blanched black- 
 berry leaves : saw the snuggled mice in the straw stacks and 
 hares couched in the standing corn and the friendly horses 
 drowsing shoulder to crupper : saw tramps sheltering in the 
 flowery chalk-pits and lovers under the stars: and beneath 
 thatched roofs men lying, pinned down by the sleep that 
 comes of earthy labour, and women kept awake by life 
 awake in their bodies, and little children dreaming, and old 
 folk at their dying, and the dead reviving eternally in the 
 divine womb of earth. 
 
 She was held by her youth and her ignorance as in a
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 199 
 
 narrow cell; but through the bars of her imprisonment 
 she stretched forth hands in passionate greeting to these 
 her kith and kin. She was overwhelmed by a sense of al- 
 liance, of sisterhood: she felt herself gathered in, em- 
 braced, merged in the endlessly faceted identity of the 
 universe. She was burningly happy. All knowledge sang 
 in her ears: all secrets lay bare and beautiful to her eyes. 
 She understood all things and forgot them, and remem- 
 bered them, and forgot them again, with the carelessness 
 of illimitable possession. 
 
 Out of that timeless ecstasy she looked down upon her 
 life lying like a sloughed snake-skin at her feet: surveyed 
 the length of it, past, present, and future, with infinite 
 
 wise amusement, thinking Here Laura went wrong. 
 
 . . . This how foolish! she did not do. ... And then, 
 
 with a quickening and personalization of interest She 
 
 should have told Justin I must tell Justin. . . . 
 
 But at that, as if the word 'Justin' were the signal for 
 the inevitable revulsion, she felt herself contracting, shud- 
 dering away again from the universal life, crying in futile 
 anger and despair: "All this is too big is too big for 
 me. This will kill me. I can't hold it. I'm not God!" 
 And so, with the roar in her ears of huge waters rushing 
 into a deep and narrow channel, was back in her body 
 again, with but one word of all the infinite wisdom that 
 had been hers echoing in her memory the one word 'Jus- 
 tin.' She found herself repeating it over and over again, 
 unintelligently, like a lost child "Justin. Where's Jus- 
 tin? I want Justin." 
 
 And all the myriad voices of the life she had shared 
 merged in one to answer her, to answer with laughter that 
 was like sunlight, with laughter that was like tears, to an- 
 swer her with the still small Voice Itself 
 
 ' ' Find Justin then. Love Justin then. Am I not Justin 
 also?" 
 
 She listened and was comforted : and going home, went to 
 bed and slept.
 
 CHAPTER XXIV 
 
 As a friend and as a needlewoman, Coral was indefatigable. 
 Laura's trousseau absorbed her and she ended, with the 
 marked approval of Mrs. Cloud and Aunt Adela, not only 
 in converting the roll of lawn into a pile of delectable 
 garments, but in annexing the quarter's dress-money which 
 Laura had intended spending on a garden hat, a complete 
 set of the poems of Mr. Alfred Noyes, and a birthday pres- 
 ent for the twins, who, installed in a counting-house and 
 chambers, and very much men about town, were neverthe- 
 less desperately in need, Laura dear, (if any one wants 
 to know, you know) of basket-chairs and summer pants. 
 
 Laura, contemplating the silk and muslin for which 
 Coral, in conclave with Mrs. Cloud, had exchanged that 
 elastic seven pounds ten, did not know whether to be al- 
 lured or incensed. 
 
 "It's sweet of you, of course. They're delicious. But 
 such waste, Coral! They'll go out of fashion. I'm not 
 going to be married tomorrow ! ' ' 
 
 Coral rubbed her nose in that meditative way of hers 
 that was disastrous to her complexion. 
 
 "How long have you been engaged?" 
 
 "Oh, about a year." 
 
 "A year! Why on earth don't you get married?" 
 
 "It's never been quite convenient. We were going to 
 last spring, but then the chance came to join that expedi- 
 tion " 
 
 Coral interrupted her. 
 
 "Laura, tell me honestly do you enjoy fiddling about 
 over birds' eggs?" 
 
 Laura flushed. 
 
 "Why, I know as much about them as Justin. He said. 
 
 200
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 201 
 
 so the other day. If he were in doubt about a bird, I 
 believe he'd listen to me. I'm longer-sighted, you know. 
 He would, honestly, if he hadn't made up his mind." 
 
 "Is he ever wrong?" Coral's voice was colourless. 
 
 "I've never known him wrong," said Laura in all grav- 
 ity. "Only, of course, he sometimes changes his mind. 
 And that's what always annoys me so, you know, that I 
 never really know why he does. But I suppose when one 's 
 married ? ' ' 
 
 "No," said Coral thoughtfully. "No. Oh, of course, 
 after a time you'll get to know what they'll do always, but 
 you never really know why they do it. ' ' 
 
 "That's what makes it difficult," Laura sighed. 
 
 "How difficult?" 
 
 "Well, to keep in step, I mean. You see, he'll think 
 Carson a sort of Cromwell for months, and I get hardened 
 to the Daily Mail and read up William and Mary so as to 
 back him against Gran 'papa, and then, all of a sudden 
 well, he's Home Rule at present. It makes it a little diffi- 
 cult for me." 
 
 Coral stared, with all the indifference of her class and 
 her type to that particular amusement of its men-folk. 
 
 "Oh, politics! I shouldn't worry about politics. As if 
 one had time for an opinion about politics!" 
 
 Laura, with other blood in her veins, stared in her turn. 
 
 "But naturally I've an opinion! I'm not a fool! 
 Only " she began to laugh "I don't let on." 
 
 ' ' Why ? ' ' But Coral looked as if she knew. 
 
 "Well, you see," Laura warmed to her engrossing sub- 
 ject, "he says he thinks that every one ought to stick to 
 their own ideas and be independent. But he always thinks 
 (and you know, Gran 'papa's just the same) that it's amaz- 
 ing that the people who disagree with him can be so in- 
 tolerant and impervious to reason. So I always begin by 
 disagreeing and let him argue it out. And then I see his 
 point and he thinks how sensible I am. And if I know 
 beforehand what he's going to say about a thing I say it
 
 202 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 quickly first. Then he nods at me, as if anyhow he were 
 always sure of me." 
 
 "Well, of all the hypocrites " 
 
 "It isn't. Don't you see?" 
 
 Coral looked at her kindly. 
 
 ' ' Oh, in a way I suppose, it is ' ' Laura sighed. ' ' But 
 but I don't believe it's wrong. You see Justin's so 
 straight-forward. If he's in a mood well, he's in a mood. 
 He couldn't suppress himself for the sake of oh, polite- 
 ness or amusing people or being pleasant. He wouldn't 
 know how to. But, my dear, if I started that being my- 
 self it wouldn't work. Suppose I were in a depressed 
 mood one day when Justin was cheerful and stuck to my 
 mood instead of slipping into his? Why, he wouldn't 
 know what was happening. He'd ask if I'd got toothache. 
 He'd be bored to death." 
 
 Coral was looking interested. 
 
 "Considering the little fool you can be, you know some- 
 thing about men. Where d'you get it from, Laura?" 
 
 "Birds' eggs," said Laura with a twinkle. 
 
 "Oho! Now I see! Well, fire ahead! 'Justin would 
 be bored.' Not that that would hurt him." 
 
 "No, but, he'd go home. And if I were myself for a 
 week he 'd go home for good. I 'd lose him. And then I 'd 
 die." 
 
 "You won't keep it up when you're married," said 
 Coral, with her esoteric smile. 
 
 "I shall. Always and always and always. Every day 
 till the last minute of my life. What does it matter ? I 'm 
 happy. But it's all nonsense to say that two plants can 
 grow in one pot. It doesn't work. They haven't room. 
 But you can graft one on to the other as a rule. I'm 
 grafted on to Justin. Oh, I daresay I'd have been a 
 showier plant in a pot of my own; but it's too late to 
 ungraft me now. I'd shrivel. I'm rooted in Justin." 
 
 Coral, demolishing that theory of life, was Jael and her 
 hammer in one.
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 203 
 
 "That's crazy. That doesn't work. Suppose he died? 
 "What's the use of shuddering? He might. It's not com- 
 mon sense to get so fond of any one. It's not fair to your- 
 self." 
 
 Laura smiled. 
 
 "You needn't worry about me." 
 
 "And " Coral had an odd, fugitive air of resenting 
 the happy light in Laura's eyes "it's not fair to him." 
 
 The light faded. Laura began anxiously 
 
 ' ' Not fair ? What do you mean not fair ? ' ' 
 
 ' ' Only that you '11 spoil him, if you haven 't already, you 
 and Grannie between you. And I '11 tell you another thing. 
 Haven't you found out yet, you little fool, that a man 
 doesn't want to be loved? He wants to do that himself. 
 He'll think all the world of you if you make him feel like 
 loving you ; but he won 't say thank-you if you just love 
 him. Don 't tell me ! I know men. ' ' 
 
 "Oh men!" said Laura disdainfully. 
 
 "Well, Justin's not a cherub, is he? He's not just a 
 face and a boa." 
 
 "I don't think," said Laura, with careful forbearance, 
 "that perhaps you quite understand Justin. He's not 
 quite ordinary, you know. He wants a lot of understand- 
 ing." 
 
 "Oh, go along!" said Coral. 
 
 "Oh, I'm going. I'm going through the woods with 
 Justin. We fixed it yesterday. Come too? It would do 
 you good." 
 
 But Coral only shrugged her shoulders with an air that 
 Laura thought ungracious. It had been an effort, though 
 she liked her, to ask Coral to join them. But she had been 
 struck by a certain dreariness in Coral 's pose, as she moved 
 aimlessly across the room. The room itself, as she looked 
 at it, deepened the effect, for it was curious how Coral, in 
 spite of the well-trained housemaids, had contrived to make 
 her comfortable quarters appear squalid. Her windows 
 were more than shut, they insisted that they had never
 
 204. FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 been opened. Pink powder had been spilled: soiled blue 
 ribbons, a string of pearl beads, and the switch that did 
 not match Coral's hair by daylight, hung, entangled, from 
 a half-shut drawer. Coral had been lying down when 
 Laura came in, and the state of Mrs. Cloud's embroidered 
 quilt would have moved even tolerant Mrs. Cloud. Her 
 book and her slippers had been flung across the room and 
 the skirt out of which she had stepped still lay, a pool of 
 silk, upon the floor. Yet she herself remained as neat as 
 a hair-net and tight corsets could make her. That, thought 
 Laura, who was untidy in other fashion, was what amazed 
 one so in Coral. She was like a trim yacht in a scummy 
 harbour, incongruously yet indubitably anchored and at 
 home. The spectacle distressed Laura, too young to think 
 it right to let people be comfortable in their own way ; but 
 it distressed her still more to think of Coral sitting there 
 moping all the afternoon. She was afraid she had talked 
 too much she had forgotten how near a cry it was from 
 Justin to John. . . . Poor Coral! ... It wasn't fair to tell 
 of blue skies to a blind man. . . . She couldn 't leave Coral 
 to sit by herself in that pig-sty and brood. . . . 
 
 She turned back into the room. 
 
 "Look here, Coral you've got to come out with us." 
 
 "Wouldn't Justin be pleased!" said Coral, without mov- 
 ing. 
 
 "Of course he would," Laura lied stoutly. 
 
 Coral winked. 
 
 It is difficult to be a Samaritan when the object of your 
 solicitude winks at you ; but Laura managed it. 
 
 "Where's your hat?" she insisted. "It'll do you good, 
 a walk." 
 
 "I know when I'm not wanted, thank-you," said Coral, 
 without expression. But Laura thought she understood. 
 
 ' ' If you mean because of us " She blushed faintly, 
 
 stumbling over her words, "There's nothing you 
 needn't" 
 
 "Oh, I know that!" And again Carol's instant compre-
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 205 
 
 hension of all that Laura was not herself sure she meant, 
 was disconcerting. "But " she hesitated; then, rapidly, 
 not looking at Laura, "but Johnnie's brother hasn't much 
 use for Johnnie's wife, if you want to know and he 
 doesn 't care who knows it. ' ' 
 
 "That's not true," Laura's head went up. How dare 
 Coral Coral ! criticize Justin ? 
 
 "It's perfectly true." Coral eyed her steadily. 
 
 "You've no right to say such a beastly thing about him. 
 I won't allow it." 
 
 "All right, dearie. Have it your own way. But it's 
 true, and you know it's true, else you wouldn't be so hop- 
 ping mad." 
 
 "Now listen to me, Coral," Laura tried to be calm and 
 forbearing. "I'm not angry with you. I only want you 
 to understand. You're unjust. You don 't know how good 
 
 Justin is. It's dreadful to accuse him of of " she 
 
 hesitated. Then she tried again. "Oh, surely," she pro- 
 tested, "you know his little ways by now." 
 
 ' ' Oh, I know 'em, ' ' Coral laughed. 
 
 "Yes, but you've no right to laugh like that." Then, 
 disarmingly, "Oh, I understand, of course. But Justin 
 he hasn't the faintest idea that he isn't always nice to 
 you. He'd be horrified. He'd be hurt. Because I know 
 he tries to be jolly to you in his own way." 
 
 "Isn't it kind of him?" said Coral. 
 
 Laura stamped. 
 
 "I won't talk to you. You're impossible. Just because 
 he's not a man of words! You wait till you're in a hole, 
 that's all, then you'll see." 
 
 Coral turned on her fiercely. 
 
 "Well, I am in a hole. And I have seen." 
 
 Laura stared. There were actually tears in Coral's ex- 
 pressionless eyes as she launched into passionate speech. 
 
 ' ' Oh, Laura, Laura, it 's such a chance ! Didn 't you hear 
 him the other night, talking about Willy Mr. Wilbraham 
 as if they were pals ? ' '
 
 206 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 "That funny little actor man? Oh, yes, he's been here 
 often. Justin and he were at college together." 
 
 "Willy!" Coral swept on unheeding. "I couldn't be- 
 lieve my ears. Willy! He runs half the shows in Lon- 
 don. Why why you're made if he takes you. Think 
 of it! To get into London! To get one's chance!" She 
 began to walk up and down the room. "I I can't stick 
 here, you know. Grannie knows too. I've scared Brack- 
 enhurst already. And there's the child. Don't I know 
 what '11 happen ? Can 't I see it happening ? Do you think 
 I don't hear you all, petting him and curing his accent, 
 and teaching him your ways? He'll be correcting me in 
 a year or two my own son ! Oh, I know what 's good for 
 him. Grannie and Justin will send him to school. It's 
 his right. I shan't stand in his light. But I can't sit here 
 and watch it. Besides, I must act. I love it. I love my 
 job. It's meat and drink to me. And Justin comes so 
 superior and talks at me in Johnnie's voice, talks about 
 settling me comfortably. I don't want his damned allow- 
 ance!" 
 
 "Coral, Coral!" Laura caught at the working fingers. 
 
 "And I don't want your pity either. I can run my own 
 show. You I don't know why I talk to you, you're such 
 a little fool." Yet Coral let herself be pulled down on to 
 Laura's knee. "But if you want to know, I asked him 
 I did ask him if he'd give me an introduction to Wilbra- 
 ham. I did ask him that. It wouldn't have cost him a 
 farthing." 
 
 "But Justin didn't refuse?" 
 
 "Oh, he didn't refuse. But he made feel me what cheek 
 he thought it. I don't ask him again. But oh, Laura, 
 they've got a new show coming on at the Fleur-de-Lys. 
 I've heard from a pal a dead secret no parts given yet. 
 And there's one that's mine absolutely! I know it! My 
 chance if I could only get hold of Willy. But you know 
 what he is. Nobody can get near Willy without an intro- 
 duction."
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 207 
 
 Laura rose with decision. 
 
 "Justin didn't understand. I'll speak to him. Of 
 course he'll write to Mr. Wilbraham. He'll be only too 
 glad." 
 
 Coral clutched at her. 
 
 ' ' You darling ! Oh, you darling ! Laura, if you worked 
 that for me, I'd " She choked. 
 
 Her excitement was as pathetic as it was incomprehensi- 
 ble to Laura. She laughed and said 
 
 "When ought you to go?" 
 
 "At once. Grannie won't mind. We've talked things 
 out already, Timmy and everything. If I went up this 
 afternoon 
 
 "Oh, Coral! And miss the dinner-party next week?" 
 A dinner-party, even a dinner-party in honour of the new 
 curate and the twins' holiday, was an event to Laura. 
 
 "My dear, I can't help it. If I'm to get the part I must 
 be up in town at once. I'd go to my pal's for the night 
 and get details to know how to dress up to the part. 
 This won't do." She plucked at her black skirt. Then 
 anxiously, "Oh, but are you sure he'll write?" 
 
 "Don't you worry. You go and talk to Grannie." 
 
 Laura's security infected even Coral. She flung her 
 arms about her neck again. 
 
 "You dear! You dear! You utter dear !" 
 
 Laura laughed and left her. 
 
 When she came back she was radiant. 
 
 "What did I tell you? Of course he will! I told you 
 so ! I knew he would ! He said why ever didn 't you tell 
 him? He never took it in that you really wanted it. He 
 says he'll write tonight. What did I tell you? He says 
 he'd better write privately to Mr. Wilbraham, instead of 
 just giving you a bearer note. He was perfectly sweet. 
 I knew he would be. Now will you own you're wrong?" 
 
 Coral, in her gratitude, would have owned anything. 
 
 Laura ran on. 
 
 "Yes, and we can't go out after all, because he's just
 
 208 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 heard about that cabinet. You know the one he ordered 
 for the new eggs. It may arrive today, and he's got to 
 superintend them carrying it up if it comes. I'm rather 
 glad. The woods are sopping and I know I've a cold com- 
 ing on. So I'll be able to see you off. Have you looked 
 up trains? Does Mrs. Cloud approve? You will let us 
 know at once, won't you? Justin said he'd write most 
 floriferously. I knew he'd be nice. He didn't expect the 
 cabinet this week. He's as excited as you are." 
 
 Laura was excited herself pardonably triumphant. It 
 was a solution for so much. The difficulties with Timothy 
 Mrs. Cloud (Coral, though she were fond of her, had 
 been, she could guess, a strain upon Mrs. Cloud) Justin's 
 own discomfort Coral's unrest all had been dispelled by 
 Justin. Justin might have his ways, but underneath those 
 ways what a truly satisfactory Justin he was! She could 
 not help rubbing it in as she drove Coral to the station. 
 She hoped Coral was properly confounded Coral, with her 
 strictures and criticisms and her knowledge of men. 
 
 She said good-bye to her with relief and regret and tri- 
 umph. Her cold was worse the next day, and on the next 
 she was in bed. It was the beginning of the week before 
 she was about again. It was the middle of the week be- 
 fore she found a letter on her breakfast plate. 
 
 She did not know the handwriting, but the deep lavender 
 of the paper and the cheap ink had a familiar look, were 
 in affinity with the lace blouses and the scent and the ear- 
 rings to which she had grown accustomed. She did not 
 even glance at the signature, so sure was she that the letter 
 was from Coral. 
 
 I've got a job! Got it Tuesday, but I couldn't write 
 before been too rushed with clothes. I went to the Fleur- 
 de-Lys first thing but no go. Wouldn't look at me. 
 Never got near any one, not even the A.S.M., let alone 
 Willy. It can't be helped, but I am sick because the girl 
 who's got it, I heard today, is just my type. 'If I could 
 have only got at Willy! I know she can't walk across a
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 209 
 
 stage even just an elderly, academy flapper, because she 
 was with me in a fit-up once. But she's a friend of the 
 8.M. ''Nuff said! Well, dearie the end of it was I got 
 so fed up doing the rounds Whitney asked me if I'd walk 
 on me! I could have slapped his face and yet I wanted 
 to howl I've got all soft among you dears and then com- 
 ing out I barged bang into old Stevenson you know I told 
 you how Johnnie used to kick up such a fuss about him 
 and my dear, he's taking out a tour Africa a year's job 
 at least, and possibly India and Australia afterwards, and 
 even America. Stock. And he's offered me to share leads 
 with Phdebe Desborough! She's a good sort decent I've 
 digged with her before now and well, I've accepted it. 
 The money's not much, but they provide the costumes and 
 I know most of the crowd, and Stevie and I have always 
 
 been pals in fact, I shouldn't be surprised Stop it, 
 
 Coral! 
 
 But it's something settled anyway. That Wilbraham 
 business did for me I'd counted so. You never know your 
 luck, do you? I expect Justin did what he could but oh, 
 if I'd only been able to see Willy! 
 
 We start Saturday it'll be an awful scramble. I sup- 
 pose you and Justin wouldn't come and see me off? Don't 
 bring Tim. I've written to Grannie. We talked things 
 out, you know. And I know she won't set him against me. 
 I know that, else I'd never let her have him. But it's best 
 for him. I'm not quite a fool. The train leaves Victoria 
 2.15. If Timmy misses me but you'd better not bring 
 him. Wish I could have got the London job. Well it's 
 done now. Justin will get up on his hind legs and prance, 
 but I can't help it. Grannie won't, anyway. She'll un- 
 derstand. She's worth all the rest of you put together. 
 That's why I let her have Timmy. You'll look after 
 Timmy ? 
 
 Laura hurried on to the immense Coral Cloud sprawling 
 across the last page and smiled absently at a sudden mem- 
 ory of Coral expatiating on the effectiveness of her stage
 
 210 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 name: "So catchy! The Cherry-Pie Tooth-Paste people 
 were after it once! wanted a signed photo. Only Johnnie 
 struck the billy! It's quite worth while! They don't 
 pay cash, of course, but you get their creams for nothing. ' ' 
 
 Justin had been wooden as he listened. 
 
 But her smile died away as she read the letter again. 
 She could not understand what had happened. It had 
 been Coral's business and Coral's alone to prove her ca- 
 pacity ; but Justin had definitely promised to write in such 
 a way that the interview at least, would be assured her. 
 Justin was no tall talker. If he said he could do that 
 much, Laura knew that he could do it. Besides, she herself 
 had more than once met the elusive Mr. Wilbraham at the 
 Priory ... a nice quiet man. . . . She knew that he and 
 Justin were friends. . . . Odd. ... It was certainly odd. 
 . . . Had the letter miscarried? Because of course of 
 course Justin had written. . . . There was no question of 
 that . . . 
 
 She went puzzling up to the Priory to find that Mrs. Cloud 
 had also received a letter, carefully written and carefully 
 spelled poor Coral at her grateful stilted best ; but it was 
 nearly all about Timothy. There was no mention of the 
 Fleur-de-Lys or Mr. Wilbraham. 
 
 They discussed the matter with beautifully concealed un- 
 easiness. 
 
 "Well " Laura began, and then most cheerfully, "oh 
 well" 
 
 Mrs. Cloud drummed with her fingers. 
 
 "After all, it's her life," Laura argued. 
 
 "Yes. Yes, of course. And she writes most sensibly 
 about Timothy." 
 
 "Oh, Coral's very sensible," said Laura eagerly. She 
 was glad to praise Coral, to be loyal and affectionate to 
 Coral, in atonement for the vague wrong that nobody had 
 done Coral. 
 
 "Yes, she's a dear, good girl!" Mrs. Cloud's tone 
 matched Laura's. "I wish I wish she could have stayed
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 211 
 
 in England have kept in touch " And then, "I sup- 
 pose that part ? ' ' 
 
 "Oh, I expect there were hundreds of applicants," said 
 Laura hastily, refusing to remember Coral's excitement 
 'A dead secret keeping it dark you know what Willy 
 is!' 
 
 "Most probably she wasn't suitable," said Mrs. Cloud. 
 
 ' ' One never knows, ' ' Laura was evasive. ' ' Is Justin in ? 
 I haven 't seen him since Coral left. ' ' 
 
 Mrs. Cloud's face brightened as the sky does when a 
 cloud has slid from the moon. 
 
 "I know. He's wanted you. He's been so busy. The 
 new cabinet came that same afternoon." 
 
 "Oh!" said Laura slowly. "Oh the cabinet came the 
 same afternoon. ' ' And then ' ' I think I '11 go up to him. ' ' 
 
 She went out of the room quietly, with none of her usual 
 joyous flurry. Mrs. Cloud did not watch her go. Indeed 
 they had not once met each other's eyes as they talked 
 together. 
 
 Justin's room was full of cotton-wool, and disem- 
 bowelled cupboards, and drawers piled criss-cross on each 
 other, and a Justin so happily absorbed that Laura knew 
 she should have laughed and blessed him and settled down 
 to help. But she could not. Even his welcome did not 
 warm her as she stood in the doorway and watched him. 
 
 "Here you are! Good! I nearly came round for you 
 
 yesterday. Now look here would you put " He 
 
 went into details. 
 
 She spoke through them. 
 
 "Justin you did write that letter, didn't you?" 
 
 "But then Bellew has cases with glass tops. What let- 
 ter?" 
 
 "To Mr. Wilbraham. About Coral." 
 
 "Oh! No not yet. I don't believe I have." 
 
 "Justin! And you promised Coral." 
 
 "Well I did mean to. I'm going to. I'll write to- 
 night."
 
 212 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 "You needn't," said Laura without expression. "The 
 part's filled." 
 
 "Oh, well! there'll be another soon," said Justin com- 
 fortably. "I'm sorry. I really am sorry. But what with 
 this arriving isn't it a beauty? You haven't half looked 
 at it, Laura! and getting things straight again I simply 
 hadn't time." 
 
 "You hadn't time!" 
 
 The contempt in her voice startled them both stung like 
 a whip ; but she hurt herself more than she hurt him. She 
 had not realized that it was possible to feel like that to 
 Justin. She was frightened at herself. 
 
 But Justin was annoyed. He did not feel guilty, he felt 
 injured. He was quite sure he hadn't had time. 
 
 "Oh, shut up, Laura!" he adjured her, and then, with 
 gathering indignation ' ' Look here, you know shut up ! " 
 and so retired into the silence that awaits apologies. 
 
 But something was wrong with Laura that day. She too 
 was silent, with a difference in the quality of her silence 
 that disturbed him. Where he was dignified, she was omi- 
 nous. Glancing across at her he found her studying him 
 and his occupation with an impersonal, appraising air that 
 altered her whole face : and she had grown white, so white 
 that he noticed it that is too say, he thought to himself 
 that she was looking plain that morning. But when she 
 did speak she was outrageous 
 
 "Justin! do you know I think you're almost selfish." 
 
 That was the way, you see, that she talked to him when 
 he was up to his eyes in work! 
 
 "Oh?" said Justin, bearing with her. And then, in 
 sudden heat "Because I forgot to write a letter!" 
 
 "Oft you didn't forget," she said in her lowest voice. 
 
 "Oh?" said Justin again. 
 
 "You didn't forget. You just put it off and put it off, 
 because you didn't like the bother, because you didn't like 
 Coral."
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 "Well, I don't!" he flung at her. "She'd get on any 
 one 's nerves. ' ' 
 
 "Oh well, she won't bother you any more. She's going 
 abroad. Touring. ' ' 
 
 He shrugged his shoulders. 
 
 "My dear girl! it's her own doing. We've offered her 
 a home and income. She need never see a theatre again." 
 
 Laura looked at him in a sort of despair. 
 
 "What's the use of saying that? Do you know what 
 you 're saying ? ' Oh, Sunflower, I 've such a nice cellar for 
 you ! If you '11 come and live in it, you never need see the 
 sun!' " 
 
 "You're talking absolute nonsense," said Justin aus- 
 terely. 
 
 "I'm not. It's you. You can no more put yourself in 
 
 another person 's place You can no more imagine how 
 
 Coral feels " 
 
 He looked at her, on that, with something of the despair 
 with which she had looked at him. 
 
 "Look here, old girl," he began, with heavy patience, 
 "you mayn't believe me, but honestly, if I'd had any idea 
 you were so keen on Coral " 
 
 ' ' Coral ? Coral ? What do I care for Coral ? " she asked 
 him fiercely. 
 
 "But if you're not upset about Coral," demanded the 
 logical sex, "what's all the row about? What's the matter 
 with you?" 
 
 She turned away from him because she felt her lips were 
 trembling. 
 
 "I don't know," she said weakly. "I don't know." 
 And then ' ' I know I 'm very unhappy. ' ' 
 
 She trailed away to the window, without a glance, with- 
 out, I give you my word, a glance at the new cabinet, though 
 it half blocked her way. 
 
 He did not know whether he should laugh or be bored by 
 her inexplicability. He was not in the habit of translating
 
 2U FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 his sensations into thoughts, but what he really wanted 
 was that she should stop talking and be smiling and in- 
 terested in his interests, and be quick about it, so that he 
 might legitimately dispense with his quite definite discom- 
 fort. Yet if, at that moment, she could have broken down 
 completely, letting her trouble and her anxious love for him 
 show itself in a storm of tears, I believe that she might 
 have won him. He would have recognized tears : he would 
 have understood tears: he would have done anything to 
 comfort tears. Can't you foresee his horrified distress? 
 She might have said all her say and he would have listened. 
 It was her chance, hers for the taking! 
 
 But she she had learned so rigidly to repress herself in 
 speech and still more in manner, that she found herself at 
 such a moment not moved but frozen. She took it, with a 
 sort of dreary triumph, as a sign that she had at last at- 
 tained self-mastery, Justin's virtue not considering that a 
 runaway engine and an engine that has jammed are equally 
 beyond the driver's control. And so governed as ever by 
 the Code, she told him that she was unhappy in the tone 
 that she would have told Him that her new shoes were 
 tight. Yet she never dreamed that he took her flippancy 
 at its face value he Justin whose Adamry, with the 
 deadly injustice of pure worship, she had endowed with 
 omniscience. If Justin did not understand it was because 
 he did not choose: and he did not choose because her emo- 
 tion offended his inexorable taste. Thus, merciless to him 
 as he to her, she reasoned, and for the first time in her life 
 was bitter against him for the hardness of his heart. Yet, 
 affected as she must always be by his each unconscious 
 change of tone, how could she fail to respond when he 
 laughed at this good joke of hers and, without admitting 
 that he should or should not have written to Coral, put it 
 to her, as a woman and a collector, that it was time to 
 change the subject. 
 
 "Unhappy? Rats! Come and help with the shelves. 
 Coral can look after herself. Besides, of course I'll fix up
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 215 
 
 something. Only leave me alone, Laura! I've not done 
 you any harm. Don 't worry so ! I can look after myself, 
 can't I?" 
 
 She looked at him with great doubtful eyes. 
 
 He laughed impatiently. 
 
 "Don't be such a grandmother," he insisted. "Leave 
 me alone ! ' ' 
 
 She gave him a smile then, a half smile as doubtful as her 
 eyes; but she shook her head. 
 
 "I can't," said Laura. 
 
 "Oh, stuff!" said Justin. 
 
 And then they began to discuss matters of importance.
 
 CHAPTER XXV 
 
 LAURA had wanted Justin to come with her to see the last 
 of Coral. She knew that Coral would expect it : she was of 
 the class that could be genuinely moved in public. But she 
 knew also that Justin would shiver at the idea of Coral's 
 farewells. She wished he did not have to be considered: 
 she wished he could laugh and say "Oh, well, we must go 
 through with it, I suppose," and provide himself with 
 chocolates and roses, and endure a farewell from his sister- 
 in-law that might or might not culminate in an embrace. 
 She wished he would be vulgar and human and uncritical 
 for once. She wished 
 
 Of course he would come if she asked him. ... It would 
 be a nuisance, naturally, with the dinner-party in the eve- 
 ning, but they could go up by one train and come back by 
 the next, or start earlier and have their lunch in town. 
 ... If she suggested lunch he would surely come. . . . 
 A man hates to be hurried, but with due time allowed for 
 the importances of life he would come? . . . He ought to 
 come. After Coral's message he ought to come. . . . She 
 would go up again to the Priory that very afternoon to ask 
 him. . . . 
 
 She did. She went up to the Priory on Thursday, and 
 again on Friday for that express purpose, but she found 
 when she tried that she was not able to ask him. She could 
 not get out the words. She was afraid of his acquiescence, 
 of his bored, impatient acquiescence that was worse than a 
 refusal. She was afraid it gave her a shock to realize 
 that she was actually afraid of Justin. 
 
 She took the discovery up to town with her that Satur- 
 day, setting it to the monody of the train. 
 
 * ' Afraid of Justin ? Afraid of Justin 1 ' ' 
 
 216
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 ' ' Absurd ! Absurd ! Afraid of Justin ? ' ' 
 
 Coral, explicitly, and almost before they were in speak- 
 ing distance, explanatively out of mourning, did not soothe 
 her. Coral must needs interrupt embraces, and introduc- 
 tions to the company, and asides to porters, and high- 
 pitched laughter, and a rattle of news, to say 
 
 11 You 're no relation! Where's my dear brother-in- 
 law?" 
 
 "He was awfully sorry. He was kept at the last mo- 
 ment quite unexpectedly. He sent all sorts of messages, ' ' 
 said Laura successfully. Then, because she was an ama- 
 teur, she added the touch too much: "He was sure you'd 
 understand. ' ' 
 
 Coral was appreciative. 
 
 "What a liar you are! You weren't a week ago! 
 What's been happening?" Then, with a scream of de- 
 light. "Don't say oh, my dear, don't say you've had a 
 row with him!" She tucked her arm into Laura's and 
 trotted her off down the platform. "Come on come to 
 my compartment (to myself, of course leading lady) and 
 tell me all about it." 
 
 Laura, in her fright, was cruel 
 
 "And Timothy sent messages too. Such a lot. He did 
 so want to come. ' ' 
 
 "You might have brought him." Coral stared in front 
 of her. 
 
 "But you said you said " began Laura, distressed. 
 But the clang of trundled milk-cans drowned the answer. 
 When they could hear themselves again Coral had found 
 her compartment, and, settling herself and Laura in it, 
 was giving her the private and professional history of every 
 member of the company at once till the carriage doors be- 
 gan to slam and Laura had to jump out in a hurry. 
 
 Coral leant out of the window. 
 
 ' ' Good-bye ! You were a brick to come. Give my love 
 to Grannie. I '11 write from Gib, tell her. And tell Justin 
 I quite understand."
 
 218 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 "What?" 
 
 Coral laughed. 
 
 "Oh, the message he didn't send, and " she raised her 
 voice as the train began to creak ' ' and the letter he didn 't 
 write, for that matter." 
 
 Laura ran along, level with the moving window, scarlet, 
 voluble. 
 
 "No, no! I wanted to tell you. I forgot, talking. It 
 was a mistake. I ought to have reminded him. He 
 couldn't help it. It was the eggs the new cases it put 
 it all out of his head. He was awfully sorry. ' ' She quick- 
 ened her pace, panting, as the train drew away from her. 
 But Coral's was a carrying voice. 
 
 "Take my tip, Laura smash up his old eggs! Then 
 you'll have some peace! Good-bye! Kiss Timmy! Good- 
 bye! Good-bye!" 
 
 The train roared out of the station. 
 
 Laura, as she muddled her way back to her own platform 
 and settled herself for the slow return journey, had a half 
 smile for Coral and her characteristic farewell. She must 
 tell Justin ... or better not? . . . He was not likely to 
 stand a joke about his collection . . . He wouldn 't see any- 
 thing funny . . . And yet there was something comical 
 in a grown man being so absorbed ... If he could only 
 realize that . . . join in the joke against himself. . . . 
 People would laugh with him then . . . but as it was 
 she winced people who didn't understand laughed at him. 
 He made himself ridiculous. . . . 
 
 She wriggled her shoulders uneasily. 
 
 "Of course," she began, talking aloud to herself in her 
 usual fashion, "of course it's only idiots like Coral and 
 silly litfle Brackenhurst and Gran 'papa 's always down on 
 every one anyway but they do laugh. I wonder I sup- 
 pose I couldn't tell Justin?" And then bitterly "As if 
 he'd listen! I don't count. Nothing counts with Justin 
 except the collection. Queer how men get wrapped up in 
 a toy ! If I told him what they said not that one cares a
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 219 
 
 dandelion for what they say but if I told him 
 
 They're always saying 'Why doesn't he get a job?' Pure 
 envy, of course. But he'd only shrug his shoulders. 'They 
 say. Let them say!' Justin doesn't care a bit about peo- 
 ple. Half the time he doesn't know they're there. And 
 he walks on all their corns bless him! No wonder they 
 get annoyed. Because it is pure jealousy. Why shouldn't 
 he play? He's got plenty of money. Besides," she 
 laughed aloud tenderly as she sat all by herself in the 
 empty carriage and thought of him, "it's so lovable. It's 
 like a child. He's awfully like Timothy " 
 
 ' ' Only a child, ' ' she was frowning again, ' ' a child grows 
 out of its toys. But a man what 's one to do with a man ? 
 A man's so horribly careful of his toys. What's one to 
 do? One can't sit still and let him be laughed at. What's 
 one to do with Justin?" 
 
 The Brackenhurst hills shrugged their tapestried shoul- 
 ders as she stared at them through the jolting windows, 
 saying to her 
 
 "Heaven knows! We bore him and bred him, but 
 what is one to do?" 
 
 "One must do something, you know," she found herself 
 arguing, "because he's not selfish. He's only self-absorbed. 
 He only wants waking up. ' ' 
 
 "Wake him up!" clanked the train, like a live thing. 
 "Wake him up wake him up." 
 
 She turned fretfully in her seat. 
 
 "How can one? What can one do with Justin? How 
 can one get at him? He's never been unhappy, or poor, or 
 ill. He doesn't know what anything means. What's the 
 use of being angry with him about Coral? Besides 
 they're all such little things. He's never done anything 
 really wrong in his life. ' ' And then, ' ' I only wish he had. 
 One could talk to him, tackle him then. But if I did talk 
 to him, what could I say? It's such little things. He's 
 like the man with one talent. I always did think that 
 man was in the right really: Lo, thou hast thine own!
 
 220 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 Justin's perfectly justified. It's I who am the fool. Why 
 can't I leave him alone?" 
 
 She put her hand to her aching head. 
 
 "I believe I believe I think too much about Justin. I 
 
 wish I could stop thinking " 
 
 But she could not. She was, for the first time in her 
 life, in that mood which many women and all artists know, 
 when the accumulated, unconscious thinking of many weeks, 
 of many years sometimes, surges up and overflows the sur- 
 face consciousness. It is in that naked hour that things 
 murders masterpieces happen. Those who know assert 
 that it is not an experience to encourage and that when 
 it is over you are collapsed, hysterical, and sleepless with 
 fatigue. 
 
 But Laura, who did not in the least understand what was 
 happening to her, knew only with a vague discomfort that 
 the world, the outer world, the harmonious web of sounds 
 and shapes and colours that is the background of conscious 
 life, had fallen apart, inexplicably and amazingly, into 
 individual, unrelated facts. The buttons of the dusty rail- 
 way cushions became important, importunate: the steeple 
 on the sky-line, the pony's swivel ear, were each and 
 equally a nucleus upon which her thoughts settled like 
 swarming bees, from which they lifted again in ominous, 
 buzzing clouds; while the trivial sounds about her, the 
 window straps padding against the doors, the rub-a-dub 
 of hoofs, the unlatched gate clicketing in the wind, the 
 hum of the twins' voices in the next room, the very sigh 
 and fall of her own breast, shaped themselves as the swing 
 of the train had shaped itself, into words, into a whispering 
 refrain of five words 
 
 ' 'Wake him up! Wake him up! Afraid? Absurd!" 
 
 "Wake him up! Wake him up! Afraid? Absurd!" 
 
 Underneath her gossip and laughter with the boys, and 
 
 her altercation with Aunt Adela as to when the trap 
 
 should be ready and her necessary appreciation of Gran'- 
 
 papa's concomitant and rounded jest underneath the
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 hurry of the dressing hour and her own delicious difficulties 
 with hair and frock, she was nevertheless aware of that 
 refrain. In spite of herself she listened, marked time to 
 it, fled from it into the inmost recesses of her mind, and 
 still listened to it as a sick woman listens to a fly roaming 
 the room, or to a barrel-organ, devil-driven, in the street 
 below. 
 
 It left her at last. It left her when she reached the 
 Priory and found Justin glad to see her. It left her then 
 and she forgot it at once and as utterly as if it had never 
 been. But as she sat at table enjoying herself, enjoying 
 the lights and the excitement, and the feel of her new 
 dress, and the looks of the folk she loved, she felt sud- 
 denly very tired. She supposed that she wanted her din- 
 ner. She hadn't done anything special that day. ... It 
 was ridiculous to be so tired . . so dead tired. ,
 
 CHAPTER XXVI 
 
 IT was a very pleasant little dinner-party. Everybody 
 had been cheerful and talkative, and pleased with every- 
 body else. The new curate was as neutral as a curate 
 should be and as Annabel Moulde would let him. Old Mr. 
 Valentine, quoting Shakespeare and criticizing the cooking, 
 was mellow with his hostess, and merciful to his grand- 
 children, and even allowed Aunt Adela, who always ex- 
 panded in the presence of ' the gentlemen, ' to gush and flut- 
 ter unreproved at his deafer ear. 
 
 Wilfred and James, reliable as electric switches, had 
 been instantly illuminated by the advent of the two pretty 
 cousins and by the end of the meal, were already in the 
 stammering stage of a great devotion, though still uncer- 
 tain at which shrine to pay their vows. James, singing 
 Maid of Athens with equal feeling and flatness, for the 
 ensnarement of Lucy, could yet cock the eye of a con- 
 noisseur upon the proprietress of Wilfred: and Wilfred, 
 after seconding his brother with one finger in the treble and 
 a magnificent if uncertain bass accompaniment, was yet not 
 averse, as he cushioned himself on the congratulations of 
 Rhoda, from twirling his mustachelets, so much more prom- 
 ising than those of James, in full view of his twin's en- 
 chantress. Indeed, Laura's experience, had she been at- 
 tending to them, would have prophesied a-set-to partners 
 before the evening was over, but a probable as-you-were 
 by the end of the following day. She would have foreseen 
 a matinee two or three matinees and probably a day on 
 the river. She could have told you, for all her unworldly 
 air, that Rhoda (Laura did not approve of Rhoda) would 
 wear entirely unsuitable clothes, yet look so garishly at- 
 tractive in them that James would be once more unsettled 
 
 222
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 223 
 
 in his mind: and that Wilfred, the good comrade, and 
 always the more puritan in his tastes, would be relievedly 
 ready to console Lucy: and that Lucy of the dove-grey 
 frocks, and neat shoes and gloves, would be demurely ready 
 to be consoled : and that in the small hours of Sunday she, 
 Laura, would be roused from sound sleep to entertain 
 pyjamas and receive confidences, bestowed, as a dog bestows 
 the stone he wishes you to throw for him, with circlings and 
 shyings, and coy withdrawals, with a depositing of it at 
 your feet, and a thinking better of it, and a hasty retreat, 
 and an elaborate pretence of wishing to be unmolested, and 
 of not knowing anything of any stone at all. 
 
 Laura could have anticipated her brothers' every gambit 
 to you, if she had not been occupied in discovering how 
 different from the Justin of relaxed waistcoat and pre- 
 historic tweeds was the Justin of evening dress and hos- 
 pitable exertions, if she had not been so delightfully em- 
 ployed in saying how-do-you-do to his creaseless shirt-front 
 and discreet studs and the unusually high collar that suited 
 him better than she could have believed, and in renewing 
 acquaintance with his deep voice and his slow sentences and 
 his kind eyes. 
 
 Dinner-parties were rare enough for Mrs. Cloud to be 
 similarly engaged. Somewhere near his tie (it was a badly 
 managed affair the hands of both women were itching to 
 be at it) their glances met and exchanged conviction that 
 you might scour many more dinner-tables than England 
 held before you found another Justin. 
 
 "He has his little faults, of course," conceded Laura's 
 eyes. 
 
 "And I am the first to admit them," returned Mrs. 
 Cloud's. 
 
 "Nobody ever pretended that he was perfect," Laura 
 frowned. 
 
 "At the same time " laughed the old eyes. 
 
 "And without partiality " amended the young 
 
 one's
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 ' ' Have you ever seen any one like him ? ' ' they demanded 
 triumphantly: and Laura and Mrs. Cloud smiled at each 
 other across the table. 
 
 Dinner was over. Sugar and cream followed the mound 
 of strawberries from plate to plate, and Gran 'papa was say- 
 ing "Doubtless " in the unnatural voice of one about 
 
 to make a quotation, when Mrs. Cloud lifted her finger. 
 
 "Timothy!" she said resignedly and pushed back her 
 chair. 
 
 "What about him?" Justin was at the side-board, busy 
 with cork-screw and a bottle. 
 
 "Listen!" 
 
 There was a thin piping in the air, the merest adumbra- 
 tion of a sound that might have been a mouse, a creak in the 
 woodwork, a whistle of wind, or, if one were a grand- 
 mother, a child whimpering. 
 
 ' ' I don't hear anything, ' ' said Mr. Valentine testily. He 
 disliked a reminder of his deafness. 
 
 1 ' Oh, yes, ' ' said Mrs. Cloud. " It 's the same every night. 
 He likes some one to sit with him " 
 
 "Now, Mother " Justin's hand on her shoulder 
 
 would not let her rise. "You stay where you are! Tim- 
 othy's all right. He gets over you. He's got to learn to 
 go to sleep by himself. ' ' 
 
 Laura agreed. 
 
 "I don't think a child is ever too young to be trained. If 
 you once give way " 
 
 "Exactly!" Justin nodded approval. "It's a question 
 of discipline. Now, Mother " for Mrs. Cloud was gaz- 
 ing unhappily at the younger generation. "He'll soon 
 learn to be quiet if you take no notice." He was a little 
 impatient. It was a difficult to enjoy his strawberries while 
 his mother worried. 
 
 "Yes, really, Mrs. Cloud," Laura reassured her kindly. 
 "It's the only way." 
 
 "My dear children, he'll cry the house down." Mrs. 
 Cloud could not be annoyed with Justin, or with Laura
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 225 
 
 who appreciated Justin, but her voice was plaintive. 
 "You don't understand. It's so bad for a child " 
 
 ' ' That 's temper ! ' ' said Laura decisively. ' ' Pure temper. 
 
 He wants a lesson. If he were mine " The sound of 
 
 crying grew and died again as a maid opened and shut 
 the door. 
 
 ''Smack him," said Laura firmly. "A good sound 
 smacking! There's nothing like it." 
 
 "She's quite right, Mother, you know," corroborated 
 Justin. But, agreeing with her as he did, he yet caught 
 himself contrasting her pretty, resolute frown with his 
 mother's soft distress, and thinking that if he were Timo- 
 thy he knew which he should prefer. Laura was a sensible 
 girl, of course . . . but rather hard, in this matter of a 
 small kid? Yes, hard. . . . He didn't like a woman to be 
 hard. . . . His mother now. . . . Yet it was surprising that 
 his mother had not put up more of a fight for Timothy. 
 . . . Meekly letting herself be overborne by Laura. . . . 
 Yet behind that meekness he glanced suspiciously across 
 the table yes, behind it his mother was enjoying herself 
 . . . laughing at somebody or something. . . . He knew 
 that quiet, delicious twinkle. . . . Now at whom or what, 
 he wondered, was she laughing? His uncertainty spoiled 
 the flavour of his strawberries. 
 
 Laura also found her dessert less toothsome than usual. 
 Through the snatches of conversation she caught herself 
 alert for the faint sound that had disturbed Mrs. Cloud. 
 But Mrs. Cloud had apparently forgotten again. 
 
 Of course Timothy was a naughty child . . . but she did 
 think Mrs. Cloud might after all have gone up to him . . . 
 just for a minute. . . . She had expected her to go in spite 
 of protests. He was not crying now. . . . All quiet. . . . 
 She supposed he was all right. . . . She played with her 
 strawberries. She had taken far more than she wanted. 
 . . . The afternoon had given her a headache the inde- 
 cisive, disappointing afternoon. ... It was a pity to waste 
 five fine strawberries. . . . Timothy would have enjoyed
 
 226 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 them, bless his greedy little heart. ... He was as quiet 
 as a lamb now. . . . 
 
 ' ' I suppose he is all right ? ' ' she said aloud to no-one in 
 particular. She was unanswered: the table was all a- 
 chatter. She pushed back her chair, shook out her skirts 
 and picked up, unobtrusively, her plate of strawber- 
 ries. 
 
 "Mrs. Cloud! I think I'll just run up and see if he's 
 all right. D 'you mind ? ' ' 
 
 A nod approved her and she slipped out of the room. 
 The bright old eyes followed her, well-pleased. 
 
 Justin did not miss her till he had put himself to the 
 trouble of setting up the bridge table, a collapsible affair 
 that he had never noticed was easier to manage with Laura 
 at his elbow to keep down the legs that were down and to 
 hold up the legs that were up. Deserted, he found that 
 all four legs were inclined to kick at him and make him 
 feel undignified. He could not help feeling annoyed with 
 Laura, and said so to his mother. 
 
 "Where on earth has Laura got to? Aren't we going to 
 have any bridge ? ' ' 
 
 The twins and the pretty cousins had rioted into the bil- 
 liard-room, and he regarded the emptied parlour blankly 
 enough. He looked forward to his game of bridge, with old 
 Mr. Valentine and his mother safely partnered, and Laura 
 opposite himself Laura of the intelligent questions when 
 the round was over, accepting reproofs in a proper spirit 
 Laura, returner of leads and reserver of thirteenth cards 
 Laura, drilled out of all audacities, but so beautifully re- 
 liable, the perfect partner whom he could pride himself on 
 having personally distilled from such raw ingredients as a 
 dislike of being beaten and an early passion for Happy 
 Families. It occasionally occurred to him to be surprised 
 at the acquiescence of Mr. Valentine in an inferior partner, 
 never dreaming that Laura playing bridge with Justin was 
 a very different person from Laura playing bridge with 
 Gran 'papa or anybody else. How should Justin guess that
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 227 
 
 she played her cards as a performing dog reads the alpha- 
 bet, guided, for all her rapt air and business-like frown, by 
 the innumerable hints her all-observant knowledge of him 
 gave her. How should Justin realize that his left hand 
 a-fiddle with his ear meant perplexity, or that the little push 
 back in his chair, eyes on the ceiling and an imaginary fly 
 was a sure sign to her that the game was in her hands? 
 How should he know that his eyebrows lifted ever so faintly 
 when he thought her reckless, and that for him to get up 
 and knock out his pipe against the fire-place warned her 
 against going spades when there were four aces in his hand ? 
 But Laura's sixth or Justin-sense knew it and blessed the 
 little tricks that helped her to give him a pleasant evening. 
 It never occurred to her that she was cheating, and that 
 Justin would have been horrified had he known. 
 
 But she paid the price of her ill ways. She had not 
 studied Gran 'papa as she had studied Justin, and, dutifully 
 playing double-dummy in the long winter evenings, she con- 
 trived without effort to make him feel unnecessarily sorry 
 for Justin. 
 
 Gran 'papa, with his host and hostess and Aunt Adela 
 in attendance, could dispense with his grand-daughter, was 
 mildly annoyed that Justin, fidgety fellow, must go in 
 search of her and that Mrs. Cloud should suggest it. Mrs. 
 Cloud had been pleasantly unable to imagine what was 
 keeping Laura. She had gone up to Timothy, but that was 
 half an hour ago. Justin might run up and see. Mrs. 
 Cloud would set out the cards. 
 
 Justin found the nursery door ajar and, as he pushed it 
 open, the thin spear of light upon the floor widened and 
 sharpened so that he could not see beyond it. He spoke 
 into the darkness 
 
 "Laura?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "I say isn't he asleep yet?" 
 
 "Of course. Fast. Don't talk so loudly." Her under- 
 tones were tense with triumph.
 
 228 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 "Why don't you come down then? We've been wait- 
 
 ing 
 
 "Oh, I'm sorry. But he wouldn't let me. He wouldn't 
 let go." There was the daintiest little chuckle of pride in 
 her voice and Justin felt his sense of injury melting. His 
 eyes, accustomed to the half darkness, had found her at 
 last, a splash of black draperies on the whiteness of the 
 coverlet. Timothy, nominally a-bed, had forsaken his 
 his pillow for her shoulder and there lay snug, all pink 
 curves and inadequate nightgown one small fist tugging 
 at her hair. A woolly beast was on her lap, and a tipped 
 plate that had held strawberries, for the green calyxes were 
 sliding off its rim. Her watch was on the floor, and he 
 thought, by the ticking of it, that the lid was open. Her 
 bracelets were on Timothy's arm. He chuckled. 
 
 "You've been having a high old time!" 
 
 "I?" she countered blankly. "Don't creak so, Justin. 
 What are you looking for ? ' ' 
 
 ' ' The slipper. Didn 't you smack him ? ' ' 
 
 "You don't understand children," said Laura coldly. 
 "He was perfectly good. He only wanted managing." 
 
 He surveyed the evidences of management with a twinkle, 
 but he spoke sympathetically 
 
 ' ' I say, old girl, you '11 get a stiff neck. Keep still. No, 
 I won't wake him." 
 
 With immense caution his big hands closed over the 
 clutching, tiny fingers, straightened them, and unwound the 
 tangle of bright hair. Then, slipping his arm under Tim- 
 othy, he lifted him, warm and relaxed as a kitten, back into 
 the identical hollow in which he had lain before. For an 
 egg warm from the nest he could not have been more 
 careful. 
 
 Timothy never stirred. 
 
 Laura, smoothing back her hair, watched him in silence, 
 thinking thoughts of her own. Then, as he turned, she held 
 out her hands, smiling. 
 
 "Help me up I didn't know I was so stiff. He won't
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 229 
 
 wake now, will he ? He was dead tired, poor little chap ! 
 I 'm so sorry I forgot about the bridge but you see it 's so 
 bad to let them cry. ' ' 
 
 "Of course," he agreed indignantly. He too had had 
 Timothy in his arms. ' ' What was the matter ? ' ' 
 
 "Just frightened. That pig of a nurse had never put 
 him a night-light. I shall tell Mrs. Cloud. It's a sin not 
 to give a child a night-light, with bears under every chair. ' ' 
 
 "Bears! A bear would have been a comforting beast! 
 I read Dracula when I was seven." 
 
 "It was hands with me," Laura was fumbling in the 
 wash-stand drawer. ' ' There was a curio, a mummy 's hand, 
 locked up in the top drawer of the wardrobe, at least some- 
 body said so. It used to squeeze itself out and come crawl- 
 ing down, dropping from one drawer knob to the next, 
 like a spider. My bed was next to the wardrobe. I used to 
 roll myself up in the bed-clothes till I nearly choked, but 
 even then I could feel it through the blankets pawing at my 
 face." 
 
 "Oh, beastly!" 
 
 "If they'd only have 1ft me have my kitten but Auntie 
 always took it away last thing. Here are the night-lights." 
 
 "But if you'd told " 
 
 ' ' One doesn 't, you know. This scrap was bitterly afraid. 
 I knew! But do you think it would tell me? Not it. 
 We discussed Rumpelstiltskin; but there was a bear behind 
 our chair all the while and our reflections in the looking- 
 glass, and always the dark. Got some matches ? ' ' 
 
 She lit the night-light and set it afloat in its saucer. The 
 tiny flame turned the black room grey a ghostly, friend- 
 less grey. Justin glanced thoughtfully from Timothy to 
 the swaying shadows and back again to Timothy, a small 
 enough sojourner in the desert of double bed. He coughed. 
 
 "I say, Laura " 
 
 "Yes?" 
 
 "I say, Laura let's give him two night-lights and damn 
 the expense!"
 
 230 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 "All right!" 
 
 Her voice was casual, yet there was something flame-like 
 about her as she followed him across the room, sheltering 
 tlje lighted match with closed hands, translucently scarlet, 
 a living lamp that lit up her delicate face and laughing, 
 passionate eyes and the duller red of her hair. And with 
 the same flame-like restlessness she hovered about him, en- 
 joying, a little feverishly, her brief authority. 
 
 "No, Justin not there. Put it in the dark corner, by 
 the hanging cupboard. Yes oh, quite safe. And, Justin 
 if you fastened the curtain back right back here, take 
 my scarf he would see at once there was nothing hehind 
 it. That's splendid. I don't think he'll wake though, do 
 you? Let's come away quietly." 
 
 They tiptoed out of the room. 
 
 But before the lights of the landing Laura shrank oddly, 
 like a bright sword slipping back into its sheath. Justin 
 glanced at her more than once as they went down, and, 
 the stairway being narrow, he made more room for them 
 both by slipping his arm through hers. He was discover- 
 ing that he did not like Laura to look tired. 
 
 Now their curiously impersonal alliance had never needed 
 more than a hand-shake at rare intervals to confirm it. 
 Such an unfamiliar gesture, unconscious as he was that it 
 had been a caress, meant, she knew, so much from him, im- 
 plied so much of intimacy and approval, that she flushed at 
 his touch in a pang of secret delight. Yet the fear that was 
 always upon her when she loved him most, not of him, but 
 of untimely divergence from his standards, of unwittingly 
 jarring his fastidious and uncertain taste, held her, now as 
 always, passive, denying him nothing yet not daring to 
 respond, lest an intonation, a glance, or even the little wel- 
 coming pressure on his arm, should qualify the security of 
 their relationship. 
 
 Yet, in spite of her quiescence and his unconsciousness, 
 they contrived to drift past the drawing-room door, and 
 the billiard-room door, and all the allurements of the bridge
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 231 
 
 table, to agree silently to a pacing up and down of the dim 
 terrace, with its black shadows and window-pools of light, 
 and its hedge of larkspur and lilies, and Canterbury bells 
 that jingled hoarsely, as Laura's skirts passing and repass- 
 ing set them a-sway. 
 
 They had left time behind them in the house. The dark, 
 quiet minutes lived and died unnoticed to the soft crunch 
 of their feet on the dewy gravel. Justin stared abstract- 
 edly before him, and Laura, her step matching his, was 
 filled with a sudden blessed sense of possession and for- 
 got utterly all the doubt and oppression of the previous 
 weeks. She felt herself, even as the plant-life about her, 
 reviving, straightening, drawing strength from the night, 
 and its peace was poured upon her like a precious oint- 
 ment. She could even accept Justin's silence without 
 anxiety, without the quick rummage of her brain to re- 
 assure herself that she had amusement stored there for 
 him should he show signs of boredom ideas, questions, 
 hobby-horses for his restlessness to straddle. For he was 
 restless: through her peace she felt it stirring in him, and 
 longed as she always did, to content it. She slackened. 
 
 "Justin go slower. We're disturbing the night." 
 She stood still and, half impatiently, he acquiesced. 
 
 "Isn't it big? And not a star " 
 
 He drew a deep breath. 
 
 "What's that stuff coming across in gusts warm 
 gusts?" 
 
 "Sweet briar. There's a hedge " 
 
 He sought awkwardly for words. 
 
 "It's it's like a woman breathing." 
 
 She smiled up at him. 
 
 "Why not? June's here." 
 
 He was intent. 
 
 "Where?" 
 
 "Here " Her free arm flung out vaguely. "Can't 
 
 you feel her see her?" 
 
 "Can you?"
 
 232 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 "Yes, I can," she said, low- voiced. 
 
 "Wish I could." He paused, expectant, listening, till 
 all the tiny myriad noises that make up silence disin- 
 tegrated once more. He could hear the tinkle of the brook 
 three fields away, and the croak of its frogs, and the dry 
 whisper of crickets in the flowery grass. Somewhere in 
 the valley a train roared and was gone again, brief in 
 its passage as a shooting star, and at his ear a mosquito 
 hummed by like an echo. The metallic strains of the vil- 
 lage gramophone, twanging out rag-time, reached him, 
 all silvered over by the distance, and he felt himself thrill 
 absurdly to the thin, sweet sounds. Before him lay the 
 grey, silent garden and the black velvet of the motionless 
 woods, but a poplar on the lawn was faintly murmurous, 
 like a child sighing in its sleep. Overhead the bats wheeled 
 and glimmered with threadlike cheepings. 
 
 He was suddenly aware of his own enormous restlessness. 
 A muscle in his throat was throbbing hotly : he felt thirsty 
 and unhappy, and resentful of the quiet night and the quiet 
 woman at his side who did not help him to he knew not 
 what. He turned impatiently. 
 
 "No. There's only us! June indeed! Come on in. 
 It's getting late. How cold your fingers are " 
 
 From a near copse an owl hooted derisively.
 
 CHAPTER XXVII 
 
 'Ip' is the pivot of existence. 
 
 If Justin had stayed in the garden with Laura if the 
 curate had found it pleasanter to make a fourth at bridge 
 than to flirt with Annabel Moulde if Laura had been a 
 year or two older and a decade or two wiser, old enough 
 to diagnose Justin's symptoms, wise enough to heal him 
 at the right moment with the right word if Justin had 
 been scientifically interested rather than humanly annoyed 
 by this new disturbing state of mind of his then it would 
 not have degenerated from significant malaise into mere 
 bad temper, he would not have been rude to Aunt Adela, 
 Annabel Moulde would not have laughed, and you, Col- 
 laborator, could have been assured your happy ending. 
 
 If Justin had stayed in the garden 
 
 But Justin went into the house and that new-born 
 garden-mood of his resented it, resented the lights and the 
 voices, and the need for amenities. It shrank uncomfort- 
 ably, ashamed of his own existence and, half in self-ig- 
 norance, half in self-defence, hardened, as I tell you, into 
 temper, the harmless, unreasonable bad-temper to which 
 men are always liable and with which women (who always 
 know why they themselves are in a temper and how far 
 they mean to go) have no sympathy whatever. Laura 
 tried in vain to understand what had happened. She 
 watched him anxiously, entirely bewildered, thinking 
 He's cross. . . . Have I made him cross? . . . He was sj 
 different just now. . . . Why should he be cross? . . . 
 And besides 
 
 She was naively horrified, you see, that he should be in 
 a temper when visitors were about. It upset her severe 
 young notions of hospitality. 
 
 233
 
 234 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 That three-handed bridge was in full swing did not 
 improve matters. Aunt Adela was a makeshift, but one 
 could not turn her out. Justin cut in. Aunt Adela part- 
 nered him. 
 
 Now to Aunt Adela bridge was a game. She played it 
 in the "Ah, if you could only see my hand!" manner, 
 with giggles, and leading questions, and audible asides. 
 She would regularly outbid the rest of the table and ex- 
 plain the ensuing debacle by admitting, with modest pride, 
 that she was afraid she had the gambling instinct. Also, 
 she thought it showed a grasping spirit not to let her take 
 back a card when it was obvious to every one that she had 
 put it down by mistake. 
 
 And while she chattered (she called Justin "Mr. Part- 
 ner") Gran 'papa raked in the tricks with an expression of 
 almost religious satisfaction, and Justin's face grew so 
 black that Mrs. Cloud glanced at him once uneasily. Her 
 son hardly ever lost his temper, but when he did he called 
 every one to help him look for it. Yet he was generally 
 no more than decently morose over cards. . . . Had he 
 and Laura bickered in the garden? . . . 
 
 "Having no hearts, Miss Adela?" Justin's voice was 
 implacable. 
 
 Aunt Adela fluttered. Now that he mentioned it to 
 tell the truth Mrs. Cloud's candied fruits were delicious, 
 of course, and such a good idea so much better than choco- 
 lates to have on a card-table less thirsty but they cer- 
 tainly made one's fingers just a little bit sticky and that 
 was why, she supposed, her heart had got stuck behind 
 another card. However, here it was no harm done her 
 trump would come in nicely later on. 
 
 Justin breathed heavily. 
 
 "And the odd!" announced Gran 'papa. 
 
 To make matters worse the billiard players had finished 
 their game and had gathered round to watch and comment, 
 though Justin, as Laura knew, hated an audience. 
 
 And then Justin revoked.
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 235 
 
 He had never done such a thing in his life ! Laura knew 
 his mother knew he had never done such a thing in 
 his life! But if people would gabble and chatter Beg- 
 gar-my-Neighbour Perfect farce He had never done 
 such a thing in his life! . . . He said nothing with beau- 
 tiful restraint, but those were the thoughts that you could 
 see rippling one after another over his Adam's apple. 
 It was an awful moment. 
 
 But even then the situation might have been saved if 
 Aunt Adela, in the giddy delight of the revoke not being 
 hers, had not been coy about it at the end of the round. 
 
 "Well, Mr. Partner, and what have you got to say for 
 yourself now?" etc., etc. Upon which Justin of course 
 there is no excuse whatever for Justin looked the good 
 lady very deliberately up and down and, without answer- 
 ing, turned to Mr. Valentine. 
 
 Aunt Adela flushed, with that sudden change from carica- 
 ture to quaintly pathetic dignity that an elderly spinster 
 can sometimes achieve. Laura saw it. Impulsively she 
 put out her hand (she was sitting beside him) and touched 
 Justin's arm. 
 
 "Justin!" she breathed. 
 
 He shook it off. 
 
 "One diamond!" he defied them. 
 
 It was at that moment that she looked up to find the 
 eyes of Annabel Moulde fixed upon her. 
 
 She stared back, insolent as Justin a moment ago, and 
 Annabel turned away. 
 
 But Annabel had been laughing. 
 
 An hour later, in the quiet of her own room, she tried 
 to shrug her shoulders, wisely, tolerantly, at the pin-prick 
 and could not. 
 
 If she had gone home, if she had been able to go home 
 after that appeasing hour when Justin had helped her with 
 Timothy, when they had walked together on the terrace, 
 she knew that she should have fallen asleep happily, hope- 
 fully, though on what she based her happiness and her hope
 
 236 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 she could not have told you. But Annabel had laughed, 
 more maliciously, more discreetly, yet as Coral might have 
 laughed : and in a flash the old thoughts, the old bitterness, 
 had overwhelmed her again. She inveighed against her- 
 self. Was she such a weakling that she could be moved 
 by what outsiders chose to think ? Annabel, indeed ! That 
 for Annabel! But Annabel had been laughing at Justin 
 ... at Justin, a grown man making a fool of himself 
 over a game! ... at Laura, unable to stop him, without 
 the faintest influence. ... A trifle? Of coure it was a 
 trifle, the straw which showed so clearly to Annabel, to 
 all the world, which way the wind blew. Such a trifle that 
 if she spoke to Justin. . . . What was the use of speaking 
 to Justin, of telling him what she thought? It would 
 only mean a row. . . . He had been annoyed the other 
 day, about the letter. ... It wasn 't her business to criticize 
 Justin. . . . And if it were, that wasn't the way to do 
 it. ... Men must be humoured. . . . And after all, it 
 wasn't difficult to humour Justin. . . . 
 
 She smiled to herself as she combed out her long hair, 
 and, parting it carefully, put up her hands to plait it; 
 but she got no further; for as she looked at the glass she 
 realized suddenly, with a certain crisping of her skin, a 
 certain shortening of her breath, that not only was she 
 looking at herself, but that herself was looking at her. 
 It moved as she moved, pursed lips with her, while its 
 hand divided the rope of hair into three ; yet all the while 
 it stared at her with that air of critical comprehension 
 that looking-glass faces have, and its thoughts, underneath 
 its imitative obedience, shone in its eyes with such an odd 
 suggestion of menace that she cried out to it at last, 
 aloud 
 
 "What is it? Oh, what is it? I'm afraid " 
 
 Its lips, moving quickly, answered even while she spoke 
 " Of yourself! Actually afraid of yourself. You're 
 
 afraid to be yourself, aren't you? Justin mightn't like 
 
 it."
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 237 
 
 She watched the shamed, conscious flush rise and die 
 again in its looking-glass face. 
 
 "I'm quite happy," she said to it defiantly. 
 
 "Of course!" Its narrowed eyes were merciless. "Of 
 course. It's such fun humouring Justin. It's so easy to 
 give in. It's such a pleasure to oil the wheels to be al- 
 ways exactly what he wants, where he wants, and when he 
 wants. It's the delightfullest slavery. He owns you, 
 doesn't he? and you're proud of it. Well, I suppose it's 
 worth while to you. I'm told it's a most voluptuous 
 sensation. ' ' 
 
 She winced, her head flung up in outrage. 
 
 " I 'm not like that. Never for one instant ! ' ' 
 
 But the tilted, scornful looking-glass face said only 
 
 "Never for one instant? Are you sure?" 
 
 She had a wild gust of anger. 
 
 "It's not fair. We're going to be married. It's cruel 
 of Justin. It doesn't happen to other people like this. 
 It doesn't happen in books. There was Oliver there's 
 
 Robin and Annabel Why should we be different? 
 
 Everywhere people love each other. ' ' Then, with a whim- 
 sical twist of her thought: "Well, I suppose they're satis- 
 fied." 
 
 "I expect they are." The face in the glass had also its 
 mocking smile. "They're in love, you see." 
 
 ' ' But Justin 's in love ' ' 
 
 "Is he?" asked the looking-glass. 
 
 And as she stared into those reflected eyes she saw rising 
 up in their depths as if they were not eyes but pools of 
 memory, a gleam, minute and exquisite as an enamel, of 
 green and midday blue, and a patch of black like a sloe- 
 bush and its scanty shadow, and herself, a tiny far-away 
 self, lying under it listening to a tiny Justin who plucked 
 at the thyme and the golden hawksbit as he said she 
 heard his voice 
 
 "Marry me will you? Then we needn't have any up- 
 set."
 
 238 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 For an instant the old bliss held her again. 
 
 "He hasn't grown much, has he, since then?" The 
 looking-glass could mock her while its eyes still held the 
 vision. 
 
 She answered sullenly 
 
 ''What does it matter? I like him this way." 
 
 "So much," it drawled, "the worse for Justin." 
 
 ' ' Can I help that ? ' ' She struck at the table in front of 
 her so that the brushes clattered, and a bottle of lavender 
 tipped, and fell, and broke. And while the sweet, domestic 
 fume of it filled the room she heard the instant, inexorable 
 comment 
 
 "What's the use of that? What's the use of behaving 
 like a child?" 
 
 "Am I his keeper?" she began fiercely, but at once, with 
 equal violence, it over-rode her 
 
 "Aren't you? Aren't you? Haven't you made your 
 plans?" 
 
 Her eyes fell before the completeness of its contemptuous 
 comprehension. 
 
 Yes she had made her plans. . . . She knew she had 
 always known that she could marry him, content him, and 
 find her own happiness in doing so. ... She could humour 
 him : aid and abet him in his harmless, useless enterprises : 
 lap him in little lies and call it management. . . . The 
 tyrannous motherliness that is in every woman leaped 
 within her at the idea. Of course she could manage Justin. 
 . . . They would lead happy, well-fed lives. . . . They 
 would die at last, placidly, and be buried, and that would 
 be the end of them; because the spirit within them would 
 have been stifled long ago. . . . 
 
 She nodded deliberately. Yes, she could do that. . . . 
 She knew herself capable of it. ... She had killed one 
 self already and for that, too, she supposed, she was now 
 being punished ... If she had stayed on in Paris, learn- 
 ing, growing, acquiring the self-mastery that is Art and 
 the art that is self -mastery, she would have come back to
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 239 
 
 Brackenhurst at last, full-grown, self-possessing, of ac- 
 count, good enough for Justin, the right woman for Jus- 
 tin. . . . 
 
 But she had chosen to stultify herself. . . . She had 
 sacrificed self-respect, common sense, common honesty some- 
 times, to what? . . . Not even to Justin, only to the mean, 
 selfish fear of losing him. . . . Not love but fear had guided 
 her in all her dealings. . . . She had wanted him for her 
 own, her very own: she had encouraged every tendency, 
 every fault, that would bind him to her. . . . How unfair, 
 how cruelly unfair, she had been to Justin! . . . She pre- 
 tended to love him she did love him but when had she 
 lifted a finger to help him, to withstand him, as every 
 human being needs to be withstood by those who love him 
 best? No, for she would have been afraid weakly, self- 
 ishly afraid of his displeasure, of his lack of comprehen- 
 sion, of putting herself in a position that he could mis- 
 construe. Not love fear. If Justin had his ways, his 
 little faults no, she would be honest with herself the big 
 faults that were sapping his whole character, she, and she 
 alone, was to blame. . . . 
 
 And yet the unquenchable hopefulness of her tempera- 
 ment stirred within her like a sparrow chirping in a storm 
 couldn't things be put right, even now? . . . They must 
 get out of their groove. . . . They must help each other, 
 she and Justin . . . When two people loved each other 
 ah, but he did not love her! That was the reward of 
 her folly. . . . He did not love her. . . . Her days rose 
 up before her as if she were a drowning woman, as indeed, 
 in a sense, she was, and for moments of an agony that was 
 almost physical she clutched at this incident or that such 
 a look as he had once given her, such a word as he had said 
 and each was proved a straw. Kind he was her friend, 
 her ally not her lover. . . . He had never been her lover. 
 . . . He knew nothing of love. . . . Yet he was so ignorant, 
 so pitifully ignorant, that he intended to marry her, to live 
 his life with her and his children, and his comforts, and his
 
 240 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 collections : and he would never know, not even dimly in 
 a dream, that something had died within him unborn. . . . 
 
 "My fault," she whispered to herself. "I didn't know. 
 I wouldn't see. He's clogged. It's getting worse and 
 worse. He 's like the deaf adder that stoppeth up her ears. 
 And yet he's still Justin inside. I'll never believe he's 
 not big really. And if I marry him " 
 
 What right had she to marry him? If he were a fool 
 oh, she cried writhing a most blind and bitter fool 
 was she to build her selfish happiness upon his blindness 
 and his loss? 
 
 She turned on herself again 
 
 "It's my fault. It was my chance. He was given to 
 me. I'm the unprofitable servant, and from him shall be 
 
 taken away It has been taken away. He doesn 't love 
 
 me. I haven't been able to teach him. I didn't know 
 I had to. I thought I thought he must too, when I loved 
 him so. I 've been blinder than Justin. I 've been a wicked 
 fool." 
 
 ' ' But to break with Justin what good would it do ? He 
 wouldn't care. I don't count. It wouldn't even be a 
 shock." 
 
 She fingered the fringe of the table-cover as she glanced 
 up at the looking-glass, furtively. 
 
 "And it's a shock he wants a shock He wants 
 
 tearing up by the roots " Then her voice rose. 
 
 "Ah, but I can't hurt him," she cried defiantly. "I 
 can't. You can't make me." 
 
 The eyes in the glass were alive with passion. 
 
 "If it isn't you it'll be some one else some beast of a 
 woman who won't care how she hurts him. It's got to be 
 you." 
 
 At that she sprang up from the table to escape the in- 
 tolerable domination. But everywhere there were look- 
 ing-glasses. She turned panic-stricken from herself a yard 
 away from her in the long wardrobe, to the mantelpiece 
 reflecting Dresden figures and herself, and, caught from
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 241 
 
 the wardrobe, herself again, and again, and yet again, in 
 an unending reduplication of gay dressing-gown and ashy 
 face. For she might turn where she would, she might 
 crush out the candle-flames, and, flung down upon her bed, 
 cover her eyes with her hair and her desperate, scorched 
 hands; but she could not escape from herself, from the 
 inquisition of her own awakened soul.
 
 CHAPTER XXVIII 
 
 IN the half light of the third hour she rose, freshened her 
 eyes with cold water and crept out of the creaky house into 
 the grey midsummer world. 
 
 The birds were half awake, chirruping, as it seemed in 
 that stillness, loud and shrill, tuning up for the concert that 
 was to come ; but the trees had still their motionless carved 
 night-look, and the hedges and fields were as fast as if the 
 thick film of dew spread over them were a visible spell. 
 
 In spite of the burning season the air was cold, with the 
 dank cold of the smallest hours, when virtue goes out of 
 beast and man alike, in sleep that is half at one with its 
 exemplar death. 
 
 Laura, fever-driven, trailing through the dust-white grass 
 that edged the high-road, wrenching as she went, with a 
 sort of aimless cruelty, at the dripping tansy heads and 
 trails of dewberries, felt the flying water-drops soak 
 through her thin sleeves and spray up on to her face, and 
 shivered and burned again, and had no good of them. Yet 
 the riot within her was dying out : her mood was as desolate 
 as the hour. She had ceased fighting. She acknowledged 
 her duty: was set (and therein lay her fever) upon doing 
 it. She had only come out because in the open she could 
 breathe more easily, think more clearly, and because . . . 
 because . . . (here, if she had been speaking aloud, would 
 have come the high note) because she could not bear her 
 bedroom any longer. But it was not because she doubted, 
 was questioning her duty. That was settled. That she 
 would not think of it but that she had settled, with her- 
 self, last night. But that inexorable self had left to her 
 own decision (because she knew him so well so well) how 
 best to hurt Justin to hurt him. 
 
 242
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 And so let us sit down, oh, my thoughts, not masters 
 any more, but weary servants of my will, and discover how 
 best we may hurt Justin. . . . Because it is to do him 
 good to wake him up. That is settled, though. ... No 
 need to go into that. . . . Some need though if only to 
 satisfy rebellious thoughts! You do not ask a woman to 
 tear her heart out of her body for honour or justice or 
 
 repentance' sake But if it be for Justin? Let us 
 
 find out quickly, before we grow selfish again, what will 
 hurt our Justin. . . . Not a little thing. ... A big thing. 
 ... A big thing to him. ... A thing he will never for- 
 get or forgive. . . . 
 
 From the bend of the road a pitter-pat and clatter of 
 wheels warned her that the market carts would be passing, 
 and at the next gate she turned aside into the fields that 
 fringed the Priory woods. 
 
 She wandered through the sleeping corn, following the 
 footways, and so came at last to the familiar unregarded 
 notice boards and the high tarred gate, and the hurdles that 
 held back the trees as a rope checks the straining populace 
 at a procession. And as there the children will be always 
 slipping under it and out into the cleared way, so ever and 
 again there were patches of polled hazel and seedling oak 
 and yard-high bracken running out into the no-man's-land 
 between the hedgerow and the plough. 
 
 The place was thick with ghostly summer flowers mal- 
 low, scarcely visible, foxglove and corncockle and knap- 
 weed, bled of their hearty crimsons by the vampire night, 
 and all the little pink and yellow field flowers, dim white 
 as the huge empty sky yawning over them. 
 
 She stood a moment uncertainly by the padlocked gate, 
 and then, with a vague gesture, waded through the strip 
 of bracken and, sitting down, let herself sink backward 
 into the deeps of the hedge. The foxgloves and the sorrel 
 swayed and shook above her and she pulled them down to 
 her for their freshness' sake, and let them spring free 
 again, and then lay back once more, her lips besmeared
 
 244 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 with dew and pollen, her hands clasped under her head, and 
 watched the mists, not rising from the earth but thinning 
 and vanishing where they lay, and the grey surface of the 
 corn warming to bronze-tipped green, and the dawn-light 
 spreading like a smile across the sky, and had no answering 
 smile for it, but turned where she lay, stopping her ears 
 against the riot of the birds, hiding her face from the sun, 
 and at last falling, for very weariness, into a cramped, un- 
 easy drowse. 
 
 It was roaring day without a dew-drop left in the open 
 when she woke. She lay a moment confused. Vague 
 thrills ran like ants up and down her body and soul, and 
 her stupor thinned and vanished like the night mists two 
 hours before. She had sunk through the yielding green 
 stuff and her body had pressed so heavily against the 
 damp, stony earth that she felt as if she were clamped to 
 it. Her first movement set her shivering with pain and 
 cold. Yet her linen frock was bone dry where the sunshine 
 had beaten down on it, shiny and hot to the touch. Fern- 
 flies rose buzzing from it as she moved stiffly in her place. 
 
 The footsteps she realized that the sound of footsteps 
 had awakened her drew nearer. A labourer going to 
 work? She pulled a fan of bracken across her face. Her 
 frock was green and the brishwood high : it would be mere 
 ill-luck if she were seen. When he had passed she would 
 get up and go home, out of the glare. One could not think 
 in the glare, and she had come out to think ... to think 
 about Justin ... to plan what was the plan ? . . . 
 
 She put her cold hand to her head, and then dropped 
 it again, stiffening where she lay. She knew that step, 
 that whistle. Yet what should Justin do here? Unless 
 unless could he, too, have had his sleepless night? . . . 
 
 He had stopped a dozen yards away from her. Through 
 the bracken stalks she could see his arrested pose, his lifted 
 head. He was shading his eyes with his hand, listening and 
 staring about him.
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 24*5 
 
 With the instant, all-adapting egoism of the lover, she 
 arrived at the only explanation. Something had happened. 
 . . . Some word of hers had taken root, had flowered in the 
 night. . . . He wanted her. . . . He had come to find her 
 . . . Things were going to be all right. . . . Why not? 
 Why not? . . . 
 
 In another moment she would have been on her feet, 
 calling to him : ' ' I 'm here. I '11 get it for you. What is 
 it you want?" But before she could scramble to her feet 
 he had nodded to himself, and walked on again, and she 
 watched him climb the gate and disappear among the 
 trees. 
 
 What a fool she was. ... He had been listening to a 
 bird in the wood. . . . He was out nesting. . . . He had 
 said only yesterday that he wanted more blackcap eggs. 
 . . . She jerked herself to her knees and listened. She 
 could hear him moving in the undergrowth and the serene 
 outpouring change to short, sharp cheepings, to the agon- 
 ized danger note. 
 
 He was in luck. . . . 
 
 "Krek! Krek! Krek-krek!" 
 
 She wished he wouldn 't. It was beastly. . . . 
 
 With sudden decision she rose to her feet and moved 
 noiselessly and hurriedly down the path. She would get 
 away while she could. . . . He might be strolling back 
 at any moment with the warm eggs in his hand. . . . There 
 would be the blow-pipe and the mess of yolk to follow. . . . 
 And he would go home at last looking perfectly satisfied. 
 . . . Why not? Didn't he care more for his wretched eggs 
 than for anything on God 's earth ? Of course ! And that 
 was why Coral had said 
 
 Here for an instant her mind stood rigid for the old or- 
 der. Then her thoughts, like waters when the dam breaks, 
 overwhelmed it, came rushing and tumbling over each 
 other, sweeping away the last remnants of opposition. 
 
 And that was why and that was why she was going up
 
 246 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 to the Priory that very morning up to his den to smash 
 up his old eggs ! That would wake him up ! Smash up his 
 old eggs that would wake him up ! That would wake him 
 up! ...
 
 CHAPTER XXIX 
 
 grow. We acquire. Do we change? 
 
 We talk of the formation of character, as if character 
 were not already triumphant in the infant that defies its 
 father and seduces its grandmother months before it can 
 speak. We talk of character but do we not mean habit? 
 Daily, weekly, yearly, we add to our habits, literally our 
 habits, our garments, the Joseph-coats of manner and cus- 
 tom, of tolerance and caution and indifference, in which we 
 clothe and conceal ourselves, our unchanging, unchange- 
 able selves, old as age, young as youth, sexless, amoral, un- 
 convinced by human logic, unbound by human laws. 
 
 And for years we I, with a hole in my stocking, and 
 you, Collaborator, incapable of any such thing, and Martha 
 in the kitchen, and the Kaiser at Potsdam, train up our- 
 selves in the way we should go and criticize our neighbours ' 
 departure therefrom without a thought for our sleeping 
 partner, biding his time within us. But when his time 
 comes, in emergency, in crisis, then, as sure as you sit there 
 knitting, Collaborator, that original self wakes up, with a 
 rending of garments, and takes charge. But, when the 
 occasion is over and it has sunk to sleep again, it is we 
 our bewildered, protesting surface selves who have to take 
 the consequences. That explains, I imagine, why it is al- 
 ways the most unlikely people who behave in the most 
 incongruous way, and why John Smith (condemn him or 
 admire him as we may) remains the last person we should 
 have expected to murder his great-uncle or marry the 
 princess, or why Laura Valentine, who loved Justin more 
 deeply than even his mother did (I cannot put it higher) 
 and had a fine sense of humour of her own, should yet be 
 setting out at ten o'clock of the morning of the last Suu- 
 
 247
 
 248 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 day in June, convinced that by the smashing of his birds' 
 eggs she would save his soul alive, and that there was noth- 
 ing ridiculous in the situation. 
 
 As she walked, she argued it out with him, the old im- 
 aginary Justin, in the old childish way. It was long since 
 she had had him at her side. Her common sense had rec- 
 ognized the danger of such make-believe, the folly of using 
 her mind as a mere play-house in which her thoughts were 
 actors, rehearsing each coming event with such richness 
 of setting, such significance of detail, such completeness 
 of result, that, in comparison, the reality must always 
 disappoint her. She had conquered, she believed that 
 she had at last conquered the tendency, and prided her- 
 self a little on the effort ; for it had been surprisingly diffi- 
 cult. Laura, arm-in-arm with Nemesis, did not for one 
 instant recognize her companion, did not guess that the old 
 creative instinct that she had so conscientiously scotched 
 a year before was not, was never killed, that if growth were 
 denied it in one art it would be bound to appear in an- 
 other, and again and again denied its body, would find a 
 ghost-life in her very dreams. Dear Laura was merely 
 pleased with herself because, as Justin would have wished 
 her to do, she had put an end to childish things, such as 
 telling herself stories when she went to bed, deciding the 
 colour of her eldest grandson's eyes, and talking to Justin 
 when he was not there. 
 
 But, as I say, she had reckoned without her sleeping 
 partner. On that June morning she walked the long mile 
 between Green Gates and the Priory, unregenerate, a 
 recusant, lips moving, eyes eloquent, rehearsing an or- 
 deal, haranguing Justin. 
 
 He would be angry violently angry. She conceived 
 her act, envisaged its consequences, nor lost her head when 
 the explosion came. She was face to face with the anger 
 of Justin and was able to ignore it. She argued: she 
 overbore him: for once she let herself go. She had no 
 need to stumble for words : the stinging phrases jostled fop
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 249 
 
 precedence upon her lips. She ranged her charges, calling 
 this and that incident in witness: held up to ridicule his 
 lethargy, his complacency, his lack of purpose. Her pas- 
 sion rose, she convinced herself anew, as she sorted her 
 sentences, flung her taunts. 
 
 She told him that his collection typified his attitude to 
 life and, therefore, though it had been priceless, irreplace- 
 able, instead of the trumpery it was, she would have de- 
 stroyed it just the same. He asked her how she dared 
 stand there ? (Justin's few contributions to the dis- 
 cussion strike one as having a distinctly feminine flavour) 
 how she dared and she told him that she dared anything 
 where he was concerned; that she knew what she was 
 doing, what she was risking, what she was losing ; but that 
 he should not make himself a laughing-stock if she could 
 help it ; that if he could not see that he was making himself 
 a laughing-stock, she did she did ! 
 
 She was furiously rude to him ; she 
 
 She began all over again. 
 
 They sat that time. There was no striding about the 
 room and hammering of fists upon the table ; rather a state- 
 ment of fact, an icy exchange of view. There was cut and 
 thrust and cut again, and to her sore, secret triumph a 
 Justin awake at last, revealing strength, subtlety, decision, 
 justifying her unconsciously in every estranging phrase. 
 But human nature turned from such triumph. 
 
 She began again, weakly, sparing herself. 
 
 A miracle happened. She talked to him and he under- 
 stood. He was kind. He was fine. He forgave her. He 
 laughed at her and said she mattered more to him than a 
 million birds ' eggs. And so they talked things out, friends 
 still, watching their good future rise amid those scattered, 
 foolish shells. 
 
 She began again and broke off, and began again and yet 
 again. 
 
 She was still defying and defending and accusing and 
 convincing him when she reached the Priory's open door,
 
 250 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 and, noiseless and unseen, slipped up the stairs and along 
 the panelled corridor to Justin's room. 
 
 It was empty. He had asked her to meet him there at 
 noon and it was barely eleven o'clock. She had plenty of 
 time. 
 
 She began her invariable little tour of inspection. He 
 had left his slippers as usual, toe to heel, in the middle of 
 the floor: and the ash-tray stank. She knocked it out 
 against the window-sill and the wind caught the ashes and 
 dusted them back in her face. She had to trim herself in 
 the fire-place tiles there was no looking-glass before she 
 put back the tray and ranged the pipes in the rack and 
 shook up the squashed cushions of Justin's chair all this 
 with a grim little smile. She loved his hopeless ways. 
 
 Bot the table was neat, set out with that extreme care 
 which is the effect of a hobby on the untidiest of men. 
 The books of reference were stacked in two piles, one for 
 him and one for her. He had paste and photographs and 
 scissors, and on the floor beside his chair an empty drawer 
 and a roll of cotton-wool. She had pen and ink, and his 
 beautifully bound private catalogue with the thick, lined 
 paper and blank interleaves for illustrations. Between 
 them was the cardboard box with the eggs they had not as 
 yet classified and put away. 
 
 She thought He's enjoyed himself getting things 
 
 ready! . . . 
 
 She drew the box towards her and stirred her hand 
 round among the eggs ; then, lifting a handful, poured them 
 idly from one palm to the other. They rattled faintly 
 like a woman's high heels tapping along the pavement. 
 
 She weighed them up and down. They were as light 
 as light as love. . . . Deliberately she let them shower 
 through her fingers on to the floor. But the carpet was 
 thick and they took no harm. 
 
 Then, as if in spite of herself, she put out her foot and 
 crushed them where they lay. 
 
 She stood a moment, slurring her shoe to and fro,
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 251 
 
 mechanically, to free it from the crumbs of shell, and then 
 turned to the cabinet between the window and the door. 
 That came next. ... If you began a job, you must finish 
 it. ... 
 
 She pulled open the doors one by one, sliding out the 
 glass, and ran her hand from hollow to hollow in the cotton- 
 wool. A pressure was enough for the smooth, frail eggs 
 of the finches and the tits. They crumpled like hare-bells. 
 For the bigger specimens she had to use both hands. They 
 would not break unless she held them sideways, and then 
 they cracked sharply, scratching her palms. 
 
 The business was soon done. She left the cabinet open 
 and awry, and sat down in the window-seat. 
 
 After a pause she discovered that she was breathing 
 again. 
 
 But before her mind had time to consider that phe- 
 nomenon it was distracted by another. There was a sound, 
 immense, insistent sound of an earth rhythmically con- 
 vulsed sound as of an army, an army with banners, 
 marching upon her to the eternal, infernal repetition of 
 the drums, drawing nearer, entering definitely into her, and 
 resolving itself at last into the throb of her own pulses, 
 into the beating of her own heart, obsessed by the guilty, 
 idiotic terror of nightmare itself. 
 
 ' Nightmare ! ' The recognition of the word, of the state, 
 brought relief. 'Nightmare!' . . . 
 
 "Justin I have broken " That was the sort of 
 
 thing one did in nightmare, just before one woke. . . . But 
 one always woke. . . . She herself would be waking in a 
 moment with a gasp of relief. . . . "Not true! I never 
 did it! A dream!" And she would open her eyes and 
 see the blessed sunshine filtering through the blinds, and 
 hear the birds bickering in the roses, and so turn on her 
 pillow and drowse till breakfast time. Not true! Thank 
 God that even in nightmare one always knew that it was 
 not true, although one were looking at Justin's cabinet 
 and the door stood wide. . . If Justin came in . .at
 
 252 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 any moment he might come ... he would wonder why 
 ... he would discover . . . 
 
 In an instant she was across the room, thrusting back 
 the long drawers one after another with hands that shook. 
 Her haste made her clumsy. The wook stuck and squeaked 
 and the handles jingled so loudly that it was impossible that 
 Justin should not hear them out in the woods and come 
 quickly and catch her in the act. 
 
 She managed them at last, closed the doors and turned 
 the key and stood leaning against them, breathing quickly 
 as though she had been running. 
 
 At least it would give her a pause, a moment's pause be- 
 fore discovery, in which to wake up. She tried to laugh. 
 The collection was all right really quite all right. . . . 
 That was why there was really no use in waiting for Jus- 
 tin. . . . What if she went away quietly, at once, on tip- 
 toe? . . . Nobody had seen her come. . . . Nobody would 
 ever guess that she had touched anything. . . . She was the 
 last person who would be suspected. . . . The cat ... a 
 careless maid . . . some one who owed Justin a grudge. . . 
 There would be talk and marvelling. . . . Justin would 
 rage. . . . But they would never find out. . . . 
 
 Besides, it was only nightmare. . . . She would have 
 waked before they suspected. . . . 
 
 What was that? That creaking stair? Justin? Not 
 Justin ? . . . Her feet had already carried her to the door, 
 but at that sound she slipped back into her chair, white, 
 speechless, waiting. But it was only the maid, restoring a 
 waste-paper basket. 
 
 She was instantly Miss Valentine, controlled, smiling. 
 
 "Thank you, Mary. Oh, Mary, is Mr. Justin in?" 
 
 The maid thought so, Miss had seen him crossing the 
 lawn just now : and so departed, shutting the door, fasten- 
 ing the cage, upon a trapped creature. No escape now! 
 . . . The maid had seen her, sitting in Justin's room. . . . 
 No chance of an alibi. . . . Besides, Justin might come up 
 at any moment now. . . .
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 253 
 
 She sat a long while, waiting for him to come. 
 
 She was asked once how long? an hour? half an hour? 
 
 ten minutes? She said painfully She didn't know. 
 
 A long while. 
 
 But if you consider that Justin had appointed twelve 
 o'clock, that he was a punctual man, and that he came 
 in at last mopping his forehead and complaining of the 
 noon heat, it cannot have been long. Half an hour, 
 perhaps? Yet she had sat so still that when he came 
 her cramped limbs at first refused to stir, and she 
 stayed where she was, helplessly, staring at him, till he, 
 missing the greeting and the bustle that was his due, turned 
 to her with a vague notion that something must be 
 wrong. 
 
 "Why, Laura, what's up?" And then, "My dear girl, 
 you do look white! But this heat's enough to knock up 
 any one." And so disposed of his concern and turned to 
 his prepared table, while she sought for an answer and 
 found none upon her lips save the forgotten, petulant re- 
 tort of her childhood. 
 
 "I'm not your dear girl!" 
 
 But there was neither petulance nor childishness in her 
 voice as she said it, rather an intonation of such hopeless- 
 ness, such despair, that Justin must have guessed at worse 
 trouble than the heat, had he not been talking too fast on 
 his own account to catch a word. 
 
 "Now then let's get to work. But the eggs? Where's 
 the box of eggs? Why, Laura, you've cleared away the 
 eggs! Did you sort them? I never told you to. Did 
 you put them in the cabinet ? ' ' 
 
 She shook her head. 
 
 "Where then?" 
 
 Still she did not speak. She was making the discovery 
 that she had lost control of her voice, of the muscles of 
 her throat. She swallowed once or twice. She said, her 
 will said, two and three and four times, ' ' They are broken. 
 I broke them," but she made no sound at all. The sensa-
 
 254. FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 tion was a horrible one. It confirmed, with its physical 
 reality, the paralysis of her spirit. 
 
 Justin, watching her, guessed distortedly at the truth. 
 
 "There's been an accident?" 
 
 You could not say that she shook her head, but she moved 
 it stiffly, once, a very little. 
 
 "Laura? Not smashed?" His face was tragic. "Not 
 smashed, Laura? How many? Which ones? Not the 
 whole lot?" 
 
 Again she opened and shut her mouth. 
 
 He was at the cabinet. 
 
 ' ' Where 's the key ? What have you done with the key ? ' ' 
 And then, with palpable effort "Don't be scared, Laura. 
 I know you couldn 't help it. But what happened ? ' ' 
 
 His generosity cut like a knife. As suddenly as it had 
 descended upon her the dumbness passed away. Her 
 tongue was loosened. She heard her voice, her high, shak- 
 ing voice, entirely independent of her, yet still her own 
 voice 
 
 "I did it," said Laura's voice, "I I did it on purpose." 
 
 "What?" He wheeled, staring, while within her mind 
 she implored this voice of hers to go on, to tell Justin, to 
 make Justin understand. And at last it did say 
 
 "I had to, Justin. Justin I had to." 
 
 He took a step towards her. There was a new and 
 dangerous light in his eyes. 
 
 "Are you mad? What do you mean? Are you quite 
 mad?" 
 
 She considered. 
 
 "I had to." Her voice was growing easier to manage. 
 
 "Will you tell me why?" 
 
 Her moment was come. Now she must loose her light- 
 nings, launch her thunderbolts, harangue, arraign, con- 
 vince, convict him, overwhelming him with unanswerable 
 truths. She must take the chance that had come to her. 
 Whitening, she drew breath and spoke 
 
 "I I had to," said Laura.
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 255 
 
 ''Where ?" he began, then his eyes, following hers, 
 caught sight of the mess of shell that littered the floor and 
 he lost control. He was flushed, darkly, like a drinker. 
 The natural man emerged in a quick, furnious staccato of 
 unintelligible words. A wave of terrified laughter swept 
 over her as she listened. 
 
 So that's swearing! ... So he can swear, Coral! You 
 
 see, he can. . . . And then It's like a cat like a 
 
 tom-cat! It's comical! It's horrible! It makes one sick ! 
 Stop! Oh, Justin, stop! . . . She was clutching at the 
 arms of her chair. 
 
 But it was all over in an instant. Before she realized 
 what was happening she found him towering over her, the 
 Justin of a nightmare, huge and hazy, with glittering eyes. 
 
 He was speaking to her. 
 
 "Will you go away, please?" 
 
 "Justin!" she implored him. 
 
 "Will you go away, please?" 
 
 She resisted, roused at last, eloquent at last, fighting 
 desperately 
 
 ' ' Justin ! I must tell you Justin ! Wait ! Listen ! 
 
 Just a minute Justin ! ' ' 
 
 But he took her lightly by the arm, and in a moment 
 she was in the passage, and he had shut the door against 
 her. 
 
 She went shaking and stumbling down the staircase and 
 out into the sunshine.
 
 CHAPTER XXX 
 
 IT seems to be a fact that love, like the camel, can live 
 on its own resources for a length of time that amazes the 
 less fantastic and incalculable rest of creation; but it is 
 equally certain and a great deal more comprehensible that 
 months of strain, followed by a spell of hot weather, salad 
 and strawberries, nervous excitement, sleepless nights and 
 a climax of elemental emotion, have sooner or later to be 
 paid for; that, soothing as it may be to the soul to lie for 
 three hours in a damp ditch without changing afterwards, 
 it is distinctly bad for the body; and finally, that only a 
 lover or a camel (there is certainly a likeness between them 
 in more ways than one) could be surprised if at last even 
 their strength goes from them, and they give their relations 
 or their driver a deal of unnecessary trouble. 
 
 Laura, developing, for no reason that Aunt Adela could 
 conceive, a feverish cold, dragged about the house for a 
 week, refusing to go beyond the garden, saying how much 
 better she would be in a day or two, and then collapsed. 
 Once in bed she found herself suddenly too weak and ill 
 to struggle with the kindly, overbearing Samsons who kept 
 her there, and by the end of the day the very knowledge 
 of them had passed, swamped, with the memory of the 
 past and the fear of the future, in the present mercy of 
 bodily pain. 
 
 From that timeless interval she woke one day to the real- 
 ization of a darkened room and a clock ticking, and a calen- 
 dar on the wall with 'twenty-five' in staring, black figures 
 and July above it, and below a verse, and below that again 
 a table with bottles and a cup. She recognized them at 
 once bottles and a cup and a table and a calendar, a 
 
 calendar and a table Why had somebody said some- 
 
 256
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 257 
 
 thing just now about Laura being delirious? . . . Poor 
 Laura! . . . saying cruel things like that about poor 
 Laura. . . . She was sorry for that poor girl. . . . 
 
 And here she began to laugh aloud, weakly, because she 
 was Laura herself, lying on her own bed, able to move and 
 speak, though the bedclothes were a weight unbearable 
 and there was a weight like bedclothes on her mind. 
 
 She looked up at an aunt appearing miraculously out of 
 space. 
 
 ' ' I 'm Laura ! ' ' she told her. 
 
 "Of course you are. Now be a good girl and go to 
 sleep. ' ' 
 
 "Poor Laura," she said and obeyed. 
 
 After that she began to mend, yet so slowly that the 
 doctor was puzzled. Day ate up day and still she lay 
 passive, taking her medicines, doing as she was told, with- 
 out wishes, almost without words, but listening with grave, 
 uncomprehending attention to Aunt Adela, under orders 
 to amuse, to rouse if she could, but not to excite the in- 
 valid. Aunt Adela, in undisputed command of Laura and 
 the situation, now that the nurse was gone, enjoyed her- 
 self. She was conscientious, she was well-meaning : she sat 
 by the hour at Laura's bedside in a basket chair that 
 creaked as she turned the pages, reading her items of in- 
 terest from the paper (nothing exciting, of course oh, the 
 doctor might depend on her) and stories and poems from 
 the parish magazine: and would break off in the middle 
 with chit-chat of the village, with the news that the new 
 curate had preached last Sunday, and that Annabel Moulde 
 had called to enquire after Laura. But every one enquired 
 regularly most kind because, of course, it was an ex- 
 traordinary thing to get pneumonia in such weather, and, 
 as she had told Annabel only that morning, she hoped it 
 would be a warning to her never to be without wool next 
 her skin, even in the height of summer. Mrs. Cloud had 
 said the same thing. Yes, she had called before she went 
 to the sea oh, about a month ago now, Justin had gone on
 
 258 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 ahead, if Laura remembered but Laura was looking so 
 white that she was sure it was time for her tonic, and how 
 often had she told Laura that she must try and not talk so 
 much? 
 
 Laura thought feebly how kind she was, and how like 
 the bluebottle buzzing on the pane. 
 
 But as July blazed over into August, Laura noticed, with 
 the same trance-like impersonal interest in the phenomenon, 
 that Aunt Adela's manner was changing. She looked 
 worried, yet greatly excited. She could not be talking ten 
 minutes without pulling herself up short. She was always 
 changing the subject for no reason that Laura could dis- 
 cern, for ever verging on tremendous revelations and for 
 ever thinking better of it. She talked more than usual, 
 too, of the twins and of how young they were, thank God 
 no, Laura, not eighteen, seventeen and nine months 
 and of the need for a good supply of tinned foods in the 
 house, and of how much she had always admired Sir Ed- 
 ward Grey. 
 
 Laura, promising not to excite herself by talking to Ellen, 
 when Ellen, obviously also under orders, dusted the room, 
 did not even shrug a shoulder. Aunt Adela had always 
 loved making a mystery. She was not curious. She had 
 her own mystery to occupy her, the mystery of the dead 
 weight upon her mind that was connected with the names 
 that were for ever on Aunt Adela's tongue Justin Mrs. 
 Cloud familiar names that hurt her to hear spoken. It 
 was not that she had really forgotten things, of course . . . 
 but for the moment, only for the moment, the precise sig- 
 nificance of certain far-away actions of her own had evaded 
 her, as well as the exact relation to herself of this Justin. 
 . . . Justin and Mrs. Cloud who was who, of course, 
 was Justin's mother. . . . Now Justin now she and Jus- 
 tin. . . . But it hurt her head to remember all that she 
 knew about Justin. 
 
 But one morning Aunt Adela, called out of the room to 
 entertain callers morning calls had never quite gone out of
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 259 
 
 fashion in Brackenhurst left the paper she was reading 
 flung down upon the bed, and Laura's eye was caught by 
 such enormous headlines as she had never seen before, 
 headlines that blared through the room like trumpets. 
 England she turned sideways that the paper might catch 
 the light England was at war. England had been at war 
 three days. 
 
 War ? In the egotism of her weakness it seemed a trifling 
 thing. War . . . war. . . . There had been the Boer War 
 too. . . . She dropped the paper indifferently. 
 
 But a thought, not of the unrealized present, but of that 
 dreamlike far past, remained with her, stirring her mind 
 to exertion. 
 
 The Boer War. . . . She could just remember the red- 
 white-and-blue ribbons in shops and the picture buttons of 
 Redvers Buller, and Sir George White, and Kitchener, 
 that she used to buy with her pennies. Father that 
 shadow of a shadow had been killed in the Boer War. 
 . . . He had left his business to volunteer . . . that was 
 why they were poor. . . . She remembered and the mem- 
 ory stabbed like a sudden light in a dark room the beady 
 rasp of carpet against her bare knees as she twisted round 
 from her dolls' house at the sound of voices, at her Aunt 
 Adela's voice 
 
 ''Pure selfishness in a married man, I call it though 
 he is my brother. What's the army for?" And then 
 not her mother's answer, but her mother's soft, angry, beau- 
 tiful face. . . . 
 
 It was like Aunt Adela not to realize that decent men 
 were bound to volunteer when there was a war on, like the 
 Boer War. . . . The Great War by Conan Doyle. . . . She 
 had the book somewhere ... it had lasted three years 
 that great war. ... Of course, this business 
 
 She picked up the paper again and began to read. 
 
 And as she read, those overworked, willing servants the 
 body and the brain of the body, roused themselves, as in 
 crisis they always do, to meet the demands of the shocked
 
 260 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 spirit. She felt the clogging weakness drawing away from 
 her as a cloud draws away from a hill-side. She turned 
 from a remembered past that had seemed the extreme of 
 trouble to a future that made that past a childish thing. 
 
 War. . . . 
 
 Deliberately she put aside the emotions that she owed 
 the event. 'England,' 'Right,' 'Wrong,' 'Victory,' 'Sac- 
 rifice/ 'Our Fleet' these were words that could wait: it 
 was first necessary to comprehend its personal significance. 
 This war meant it meant danger : and before this danger, 
 she saw already, one would be helpless : between this danger 
 and Justin one would not be able to interpose body or soul. 
 . . . This she tried to be very clear this was war man 's 
 war a dragon from the fairy tales come to overwhelming, 
 incredible flesh and blood life. ... It was a week old and 
 already it was clamouring for its food. . . . 'Your King 
 and Country want you.' . . . Father had volunteered 
 all decent men had to volunteer always in a war. . . . 
 So Justin ... if Justin . . . but surely Justin wouldn't 
 have to go? At any rate, not for months and months. 
 . . . Why should Justin go? the only son of his mother. 
 . . . Justin would surely understand that it was not his 
 duty . . . not yet anyhow. ... He could do things at 
 home. . . . No need no need. . . . But if Justin went. 
 . . . All decent men went. . . . He would go he would 
 
 go he would go in spite of all she would have to watch 
 
 him go. ... And there were more ways than one, it 
 seemed, of losing Justin. . . . 
 
 She turned on her pillow and abandoned herself to 
 terror a terror beyond the decencies. She was wrenched 
 and torn with weeping, frantic in her fear for him. He 
 might suffer . . . He might be exposed to bodily torture. 
 . . . He might die ... be gone from her for ever for 
 ever like a candle blown out. ... In six months in 
 three months there might be no Justin anywhere any 
 more: .
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 261 
 
 And at that she bit and tore at her wrist lest she should 
 scream aloud. 
 
 It was a madness that spent itself at last, as such things 
 must, leaving her sane and heavy-eyed and ashamed. And 
 in that desolate lull she could hear the voice, cold, dis- 
 loyal, of another subtler fear 
 
 Suppose suppose he did not go ? ... 
 
 When Aunt Adela came back an hour later, stuffed to 
 bursting with gossip that must on no account be imparted 
 to the invalid, she found Laura sitting up in bed, her eyes 
 quick and intelligent, her passivity a thing of the past. 
 
 She acclaimed her. 
 
 "My dear, you're better! You've got quite a colour." 
 
 "Yes." Laura touched the paper beside her. "You 
 ought to have told me. Why didn't you tell me?" 
 
 Aunt Adela looked guilty. 
 
 "Did I leave ? I never meant My child, you 
 
 weren 't fit Laura, what are you doing ? ' ' 
 
 Laura threw back the sheets. 
 
 "I've got to get up." Then, softening at her aunt's 
 horror, ' ' Poor Auntie ! I must have been a nuisance. But 
 I 'm all right now. Can 't you see ? Who was it ? " 
 
 "Oh, Mrs. Gedge. Laura, don't be ridiculous! Cover 
 yourself up! They're in such trouble. They can't hold 
 Robin. And he was to have been ordained. I'm as pa- 
 triotic as any one, but I do not see But it takes hold 
 
 of the men somehow. I remember your father 
 
 Extraordinary! People you'd never dream Now 
 
 wouldn't you call Justin Cloud the last person ?" 
 
 She checked herself. "Oh, Laura, I didn't mean to tell 
 
 you not yet the doctor Now, Laura, I will not 
 
 have you getting up ! " 
 
 But Laura, hanging on to the edge of the dressing-table, 
 was tugging feebly at a drawer. 
 
 "I must. I must be well. There must be things to do. 
 D 'you think I can lie here ? When did you hear ? ' '
 
 262 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 Aunt Adela was resigned. 
 
 "Well, if you must, I'll get you a dressing-gown. Of 
 course, Dr. Bradley has said all along that if you could 
 only make the effort " 
 
 Laura swayed where she stood. 
 
 "I'm all right. When did you hear?" 
 
 "About Justin? I knew you'd be upset. Not that he'll 
 get out. Everybody says it can't last six months. But I 
 wonder he hasn't written. I had such a nice note from 
 Mrs. Cloud, apologizing for not seeing me when I called. 
 She was at home for a few days getting things together. 
 She is going to town for the present to be near him, till he 
 knows where he's training. And her love to you. H.A.C. 
 I wonder if he 11 get a commission ? But you '11 be hearing 
 from Justin himself in a day or two, I expect. Would 
 you like some hot water?" 
 
 She bustled out of the room. 
 
 Laura, bent and flushed over the task of putting on 
 stockings, for the grasshopper was still a burden for all 
 her high-handedness, wondered how she was to convey to 
 Aunt Adela that there would be no letters from Justin. 
 And from that passed dully to the knowledge that if she 
 had been patient, if she, wise in her own eyes, had not 
 chosen to force the issue, there would have still been 
 'letters' in her life. And who, pray, was she to have 
 doubted Justin ? ' * H.A.C. the first week ! ' ' This was the 
 man that she would have ruled and schooled! ... "A 
 shock that's what he wants a shock.". . . her own words 
 were a bitter taste in her mouth. For now it had come, the 
 shock, the real thing no crazy schoolgirl artifice and she 
 was justified to her own undoing. "A private the first 
 week!" 
 
 Justified thank God she was justified. But there would 
 be no letters from Justin.
 
 CHAPTER XXXI 
 
 JUSTIN CLOUD and Robin Gedge got their commissions on 
 the same day. But while Robin appeared in Brackenhurst 
 every few weeks, bronzed and broadened, to bewail his 
 stagnancy, Justin, by luck o' war, or, as Robin jealously 
 declared, by pulling wires, was out in France and having 
 parcels sent to him before Brackenhurst had set up its first 
 Belgian Committee. Laura, going in to tea with Mrs. 
 Cloud on her way home from the Supply Depot in the 
 vicarage barn, would sometimes see the parcels being done 
 up; but she was never asked to help. That was the only 
 difference that Mrs. Cloud ever made in her treatment of 
 Laura. But for that circumstance Laura would have said 
 that she knew nothing of that summer morning in another 
 life. She seldom spoke of Justin, but when she did, it 
 was as gently and openly as usual. Yet that she should not 
 know all that had happened seemed incredible . . . Justin 
 told his mother everything . . . and surely, if she 
 knew Did she know? . . . 
 
 The uncertainty made Mrs. Cloud's unfailing kindness 
 hard to bear. 
 
 But it was typical of the girl and the woman alike that 
 they never dreamed of approaching the subject in their 
 almost daily intercourse. If either had been less occupied 
 it is probable that their common anxiety might have loos- 
 ened at least Laura's tongue. But Mrs. Cloud was at the 
 head of every good work in the village and Laura, as the 
 year wore to an end, had her hands full at home. For 
 Gran 'papa, testily intolerant of cinnamon or sympathy, 
 packing off his daughter to her depot, submitting grudg- 
 ingly to his granddaughter's ministrations, Gran 'papa, 
 denying it with every difficult breath, fell ill. "Nothing 
 
 263
 
 264 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 serious, I hope, Miss Valentine?" "No only a cold. 
 E very-one catches cold in winter time. Gran 'papa has a 
 cold." 
 
 But the wet bitter weather of that first winter of war 
 was a harvester who reaped in the camps and training 
 grounds on behalf of death himself, more bloodily busy else- 
 where a harvester whose sickle was chill and his reaping 
 hook pneumonia a busy harvester who yet had time to 
 go gleaning in the bare homes of the land for such bent 
 and broken straws as had been left behind. 
 
 Looking back, looking down the civilian death lists for 
 which nobody has had time these three long years, you see 
 how abnormally the old and the half-old suffered. Death 
 after death in the 'sixties and early 'seventies ' Quite sud- 
 denly' 'After a short illness' it comes over and over 
 again. You think of them as old limpets, wrenched from 
 their rocks of ages, flung, too old to learn to cling again, 
 into the sea of this war. And then, fastening on their 
 shocked feebleness the cold. 
 
 In Brackenhurst alone there were more deaths in that 
 first autumn than in all the two years before. 
 
 Old Mrs. Whittle was the first to succumb old Mrs. 
 "Whittle, the Valentines' half bed-ridden pensioner who 
 lived in one room at the top of rickety stairs, which Wilfred 
 and James had never been induced to climb when they went 
 with Laura and Nurse on Sunday afternoons to carry Mrs. 
 Whittle beef-tea and sixpences. It always struck Laura 
 as so unfair that because of their easy blubberings they 
 should be allowed to wait at the foot of those witch-cottage 
 stairs, while she, as frightened as they of the bright eyes 
 and the hoarse whisper and the movements in the crimson 
 shawl, always found herself following Nurse without a 
 protest into the tiny, rank room. Yet, though she did not 
 know it, it had not been Nurse, but her own innate fear 
 of causing pain, that had forced her steps. More insistent 
 than the fear of Mrs. Whittle had been the fear of hurting 
 Mrs. Whittle's feelings. She had stolidly endured the din}
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 265 
 
 airlessness, the fire that spat startlingly, the bedclothes- 
 smell, and sometimes setting her teeth a kiss from Mrs. 
 Whittle, rather then hurt the feelings of Mrs. Whittle 
 who had rheumatics. 
 
 ' ' Bless everybody, and Justin, and give Mother my dear 
 love, and make Mrs. Whittle quite well," had run, in the 
 dim years, her nightly petition. 
 
 Laura hated pain. 
 
 And now Mrs. Whittle was dead, needing neither six- 
 pences nor Sunday visits any more from a grown-up Laura. 
 
 Old Jackson, digging her water-logged grave, in an 
 absent son's stead, shivered and coughed in the keen wind 
 and followed her in a week. Two children from Laura's 
 Sunday-school fell sick of neglected colds and the listless, 
 pining mother, in her dyed mourning, let Laura and the 
 doctor do as they pleased. The long lists lengthened in 
 the church porch and for a month there had been no news 
 of Justin, not even ttie second-hand, meagre comfort, the 
 'I am quite well' of a field-postcard, filtering through to 
 her by way of Mrs. Cloud. She had been glad to have 
 her hands full. It helped to help people. . . . And the 
 news got worse and worse. 
 
 And then Gran 'papa had caught cold. 
 
 Aunt Adela was inclined to blame Papa. Papa had in- 
 sisted on going at his age ! all the way to the station last 
 Sunday, to get a paper for Laura he, who so strongly dis- 
 approved of Sunday papers. And all because Laura, at 
 lunch, before she hurried off to those wretched children, 
 had said something about wishing for a Sunday delivery! 
 Papa was very difficult to manage. She had spoken to 
 Laura seriously about it on her return. Between them they 
 might, another time, circumvent easily enough an obstinate 
 old man for his own good, of course. But Laura, who was 
 a peculiar girl in some ways, had merely stared at her aunt 
 with those blank, black eyes, had merely said with a ridicu- 
 lous catch in her voice 
 
 "Do you mean to say that Gran 'papa " And then,
 
 266 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 breaking off in that irritating way of hers, had gone up 
 without another word to Papa's room. Had stayed there 
 till supper-time had not even come down to say how do 
 you do to the rector had spent every spare minute of her 
 time there since. Well she would catch Papa's cold for a 
 certainty, and then she would see ! 
 
 But Laura did not catch Gran 'papa's cold. It was not 
 one of his usual colds, the angry, vigorous, resentful colds 
 of his healthy old age, but a feverish indisposition, a cer- 
 tain fading and shrinking of body that accompanied a 
 glittering, fitful, mental activity. The change in him was 
 so marked, so swift, that at the end of the week Laura 
 looked back to the Gran 'papa of last Sunday as to a mem- 
 ory, as to a stranger. 
 
 He would not go to bed, but sat crouched over the fire 
 in the armchair that Laura had never before realized was 
 so much too big for Gran 'papa. She, when she could, sat 
 with him, eternally knitting socks for the army that must 
 always be to her but a multiplication of Justin, thinking 
 of him and herself, and now, with new, bewildered thoughts, 
 of Gran 'papa. 
 
 She had been touched, almost beyond her strength, by 
 that thought of his for her by the sight of the paper in 
 Gran 'papa's shaking hand, handed to her with a gesture 
 that he could not, even then, prevent from being gingerly. 
 The knowledge that he had guessed something, that he 
 had been aware of the anxiety that showed itself in her 
 feverish lust for news, that he, behind his reserves and 
 absorptions, had watched her, felt for her made her want 
 to cry. She could be Spartan, but of necessity, not from 
 choice. There was nothing of the Emily Bronte in her 
 nature: she took as generously as she gave. She had 
 strength and pride, but though she did without it, she 
 never pretended that sympathy would not have been sweet. 
 In those days, though she did not know it, though she had 
 nearly forgotten her, she wanted her mother. 
 
 Gran 'papa's look at her as she came to him that Sunday,
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 267 
 
 his silence, his awkward thrust of the rag he abhorred into 
 her hand, did more than touch her it strengthened her. 
 She, to whom kith and kin had never meant much, had 
 felt for the first time the comfort of the blood-tie, of the 
 clan-love that is independent of all accidents of personality 
 or desert. Gran 'papa might not love Laura, but she real- 
 ized at last how faithfully he loved his grand-daughter. 
 
 She had taken the paper and thanked him, and settling 
 herself opposite him in her grandmother's chair, had sat 
 quietly reading the aching headlines. And in the silence 
 that followed she had felt, through all her urgent anxiety, 
 how the icy crust under which the quiet river of their mu- 
 tual affection had always flowed imprisoned, was melting at 
 last. They made no demonstration. It was not in his 
 nature, even in its strength, and now he was old, enfeebled ; 
 while she had been so drilled by the necessities of her life 
 with Justin that she wore repression, like a dress, laced over 
 her natural impulsiveness ; nevertheless they had eased each 
 other. For the first time in her life she was not on her 
 best behaviour with him: her little ways, the occasional 
 mannerisms, he passed over in silence, or perhaps, because 
 she was at her entire ease, they occurred no longer. 
 
 She nursed him, in as far as he would allow it, in her 
 busy aunt's stead; for his cold ran no normal course: a 
 spell of sunshine did not brisken him: he coughed and 
 faded. 
 
 After a paroxysm it was distressing to see him he 
 would lie exhausted in his chair, and sometimes wander a 
 little or, rather, break into speech that was but drifting 
 and idle thought. And Laura, listening, half guiltily, as 
 one eavesdropping, marvelled how little she knew, and yet 
 she had thought she knew, Gran 'papa. 
 
 He talked to her, of his schooldays, of his youth, of mild 
 adventures before he married. But they all led in the end, 
 she noticed, to Grandmamma, whom she remembered 
 vaguely as a sweet voice and a smile, in a pale-brown 
 camel's-hair shawl.
 
 268 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 He would speak of her, watching Laura's face and her 
 beautiful, busy hands. 
 
 "You don't remember your grandmamma, of course?" 
 
 "You are very like your grandmamma." 
 
 "You are very like my wife." 
 
 And once he called her "Anne." 
 
 Yet another side to Gran 'papa! Laura, as she dusted 
 the drawing-room, would find herself pausing thoughtfully, 
 wasting long minutes, before the faded crayon on the bam- 
 boo easel. The youthful, slim-waisted man, with the ring- 
 lets and Roman nose and serious eyes, who reminded her of 
 David Copperfield and the Duke of Wellington, was, not 
 nominally but really, Gran 'papa: that was the strange 
 part of it. Gran 'papa, behind his shell of white hair, and 
 trembling hands, and hectorings, and fidgetiness, was not 
 a habit, not an institution but a man. . . . There was a 
 closer tie between them than the accident of kinship : they 
 were knit by the common experience of their common 
 humanity. . . . He was a man and she was a woman. . . . 
 He knew incredible that Gran 'papa should know all that 
 she knew. . . . He had loved ' Anne, ' who was her little old 
 dead grandmother. . . . She remembered hints of Aunt 
 Adela scraps of stories about a courtship that had not 
 been all plain sailing. . . . He, Gran 'papa upstairs, knew 
 then what pain meant knew as well as Laura the sickness 
 of uncertainty . . . the unnerving hopes and fears . . . 
 knew how like a stone one's heart could lie in one's breast. 
 
 She remembered again it had been so forgotten the 
 day Grandmamma died. Gran 'papa had sat all the morn- 
 ing in the dining-room, instead of in his room, which made 
 it strange enough. Gran 'papa cold, aloof Gran 'papa 
 had been stranger still. He had sat bowed over the fire, 
 with his big silk handkerchief in his hand. With a sort 
 of horror Laura had watched him, had seen that he was 
 crying. He had looked up at her then and had said 
 she remembered his voice and his words "Forty years 
 forty years " over and over again. And then kindly, as
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 269 
 
 if he knew she were frightened "You've never seen a man 
 cry, have you, child?" And Aunt Adela had said 
 "Papa!" in a queer, warning voice. 
 
 That was all she remembered. But the words would 
 not leave her as she rubbed the shining chair legs and 
 pounded ostentatiously up and down the key-board, to 
 assure Aunt Adela, if Aunt Adela should be on the alert, 
 that she was dusting properly. 
 
 "A man" not "Your grandfather." ... "A man" 
 . . . "My wife" . . . 
 
 So Gran 'papa thought of himself as a man still. . . . He 
 was a man. . . . The years they had passed on earth, eight- 
 een or eighty, could alter their bodies, but not their souls. 
 . . . Gran 'papa's soul if she win through this barrier of 
 his old and dying body to it was as young as hers. . . . 
 And hers as old as his. ... A soul hadn't any age . . . 
 or reckoned its age, not by years, but by wisdom, more or 
 less, that its years had taught it. ... And so why 
 shouldn't they talk to each other? Gran 'papa might help 
 her. . . . She might ease Gran 'papa. . . . For so long he 
 had had no one to whom to tell his thoughts. . . . 
 
 She would come up thoughtfully after her housework to 
 spend the hour before lunch with him, to listen or to 
 share his silence and to talk to him sometimes in her turn, 
 jerkily, by fits and starts. She never knew how much he 
 heard. 
 
 And then one day, quite suddenly, he took out his big 
 pocket-book and showed her, wrapped in tissue, a strand 
 of hair, a long coil that shone like old gold in the winter 
 sunshine. 
 
 "She had beautiful hair," said Gran 'papa. 
 
 Laura let it shower through her fingers. It was as soft 
 and fine as her own. But Grandmamma's hair she could 
 just remember had been silver, not gold. . . . Queer. . . . 
 Life was queer. . . . 
 
 She watched him coil and fold and put away again the 
 golden hair.
 
 270 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 "Was Grandmamma ? Did Grandmamma ? Did 
 you and Grandmamma ever get angry with each other?" 
 she asked him abruptly. 
 
 Gran 'papa was staring at the fire. She knew by the 
 turn of his head that he had heard her, but he made no 
 answer. 
 
 They were silent for a time, each seeing what they chose 
 in the red and black grotesques of the coal. 
 
 "She had the gentlest face," said Gran 'papa at last, 
 his lips scarcely moving. "Serene. Patient. But I have 
 known her firm." 
 
 Laura nodded softly. 
 
 "He is, too " 
 
 There was a shadow of a smile on Gran 'papa's face, the 
 smile we keep for our thoughts and our ghosts. 
 
 "It never lasted long," said Gran 'papa. "Only once 
 before I married her." He was silent again. 
 
 "It lasts with Justin," said Laura. And then 
 "Gran 'papa Justin is angry with me. We are not en- 
 gaged any more." 
 
 "It was my fault, I do believe," said Gran 'papa to the 
 fire. 
 
 "Oh, it was my fault," said Laura. "I think I was 
 mad." 
 
 She sat silent. Her thoughts were a bitter sea. Its 
 winds and waves tossed her hither and thither. 
 
 Her words came again mechanically, as if she did not 
 know that she was speaking, like a child learning lessons 
 it its sleep. 
 
 "If I could only tell him! If I could only make him 
 see! I mayn't even write to him. He's fighting. Any 
 minute may kill him. Mrs. Cloud and Rhoda and Lucy 
 they all write to him. And I mayn 't. ' ' 
 
 "Anne wrote to me," said Gran 'papa. 
 
 "He'd sneer. He'd tear it up. He'd say 'What's up 
 now? She might have the decency to leave me alone.' 
 Can't you hear him saying it? He doesn't want me.
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 271 
 
 Why should he, for that matter ? ' ' Her fingers locked and 
 relaxed and interlocked again. ' ' If I could only make him 
 understand, ' ' said Laura. ' ' If he dies ' ' 
 
 "Anne died," said Gran 'papa. 
 
 "Gran 'papa," Laura touched his sleeve, "it's such 
 misery. ' ' 
 
 "Anne wrote to me," repeated Gran 'papa. 
 
 She moved restlessly. 
 
 "I can't. I've no right any more." 
 
 She stared across at him, questioning him with tired 
 young eyes. 
 
 "Gran 'papa why is it? Why have we got to be so 
 awfully unhappy?" 
 
 He muttered and smiled to himself, half hearing. 
 
 "The time out of joint that's it out of joint. In my 
 young days April showers in April May flowers in May. 
 Anne didn 't want a vote. ' ' 
 
 ' ' There was the Crimea. I suppose there were women 
 just the same widows and lovers " 
 
 He drummed on the arm of his chair. 
 
 "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark. Do you 
 ever read Shakespeare, my dear? I advise all young peo- 
 ple The young people have turned the world upside 
 
 down." He shivered. "It's cold." 
 
 She got up quietly and shut the window, and sat down 
 again pulling her chair a little nearer to him. 
 
 "Kain and soft weather and a little sun," he rambled. 
 
 "Winter? We used to skate. But now-a-days " He 
 
 cleared his throat. His eye brightened. He was the old 
 Gran 'papa, declaiming 
 
 "The seasons alter, hoar-headed frosts 
 Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose the crimson rose " 
 
 His voice faded. He peered at her. 
 
 "You should go for a walk. White cheeks! White 
 cheeks!" Then "What's the date?" 
 
 "Tuesday, Gran 'papa."
 
 272 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 "Tut the month?" 
 "December." 
 
 "Ah, it fits it always fits- 
 Ami on old Hyem's thin and icy crown 
 
 Read him! Read him! There's a man! And died at 
 fifty thirty years too young to know old Hyem's ways. 
 But he knew!" He chuckled. "I'd like to have met 
 him," said Gran 'papa condescendingly. 
 
 He stared across at his grand-daughter, lost in her own 
 thoughts. His expression changed. He leaned forward, 
 touching her hot, locked hands with his cold, papery fin- 
 gers. 
 
 "These things pass," said Gran 'papa. 
 
 He shivered again and glanced over his shoulder. 
 
 "Very cold. The window " 
 
 Laura roused herself. 
 
 "It's shut, Gran 'papa. But I'll make up the fire." 
 She bent blindly over the dim hearth. 
 
 But Gran 'papa, with a fretful sigh, got up shakily out 
 of his chair. He was sure the window was open. Then he 
 remembered his birds, clustering on the roof of the draw- 
 ing-room below, and that he had not fed them. His fingers 
 rattled on the pane as he threw up the sash. Very cold. 
 . . . The wind slid in like a snake, striking at Gran 'papa, 
 but though he shivered he threw out the crumbs and stood 
 watching the instant, twittering turmoil, with a glance now 
 and then at the empty cage, that swung, grazing his skull- 
 cap, overhead. He missed his bird. ... Its notes . . . 
 particularly fine ... a strain of bullfinch . . . inclined to 
 be shrill, of course . . . but a wonderful ear . . . indeed 
 he had had to cover the cage when he played on his fiddle 
 for any length of time. ... It had been Gran 'papa 
 smiled jealous, positively jealous, of his fiddle ... He 
 thought he might get out his fiddle. He must not let his 
 fingers get stiff. . . . 
 
 What was that? .
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 273 
 
 He turned sharply, holding up his finger. Absurd, of 
 course, but he had thought, for a moment, that he heard at 
 his ear the quick ruffling of feathers, the pretty, question- 
 ing twitter, that had always been the prelude to full- 
 throated, indignant song. . . . The cage 
 
 The cage of course was empty. 
 
 Some bird outside. . . . He had left the window open. 
 . . . He tried, in a childish pet against the birds who had 
 tricked his ear, to push down the sash again, but it was 
 stiff and heavy suddenly too stiff and heavy for Gran'- 
 papa. 
 
 He called peevishly 
 
 "Laura!" 
 
 But she was adjusting the fire-irons and did not hear. 
 
 He left it open and turned back again into the room. 
 He was fumbling with his fiddle-case when Laura straight- 
 ened herself, and with a smile and a show of blackened 
 fingers, slipped out of the room. 
 
 "Come back," muttered Gran 'papa. 
 
 She meant to come back when she had washed her hands ; 
 but Aunt Adela waylaid her, discovered her using the basin 
 in her room inconsiderate making fresh work when 
 there was the bathroom ! Laura, undeniably in the wrong, 
 had, by all unwritten rules, necessarily to pay forfeit to 
 Aunt Adela, to attend without protest to a criticism of her 
 untidy room, to hang up skirts under Aunt Adela 's eye, 
 to dust a mantelpiece and re-adjust ornaments to the high- 
 pitched ripple of Aunt Adela 's voice, and to respond cheer- 
 fully in the infrequent pauses. 
 
 "Yes, Auntie. Oh, of course. Yes I think you're 
 right." 
 
 That, she thought, was all Aunt Adela wanted. . . . She 
 hated having her room overhauled. . . . But, after all, 
 what did it matter what did anything matter now-a-days, 
 with Justin away at the front . . . fighting? . . . 
 
 She wondered if he had liked his parcel. . . . 
 
 She wondered if he were still alive. .
 
 274 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 "What did you say, Auntie? Oh, I see. Oh perfectly 
 disgraceful I should give her notice " 
 
 She pushed back her hair. Her back ached. She felt 
 very tired. She wanted to get back to Gran 'papa. She 
 could hear the thin scrape of his bow, and the fiddle 's stray 
 uncertain notes as he tuned it. And then, suddenly, 
 swiftly, joyously, it broke into the thrice-familiar tune 
 
 Duncan Gray cam' here to woo, 
 
 Ha, ha, the wooing o't, 
 On blythe yule night when we were fou, 
 
 Ua, ha, the wooing o't. 
 
 She knew the words by heart, in the unintelligent fash- 
 ion in which one knows the words of a song. But today 
 they caught her ear, rang in her mind to the staccato of the 
 fiddle, significant, suggestive. 
 
 She had often wondered that it should be such a 
 favourite tune with Gran 'papa. Today she knew why. 
 The music, like strong sunlight shining on a palimpsest, 
 revealed beneath her mind's modernity an older picture, 
 faint and faded, of a shadowy, gallant young Gran 'papa, 
 quarrelling deliciously, a fiddle under his chin, with a slim 
 girl who was called Anne (like Anne, the 'elegant little 
 woman' in Persuasion) and sat at a pianoforte fingering out 
 the accompaniment of an old song. She had a sweet voice 
 and wore a dress of lavender print, but her smooth golden 
 hair, as the impression faded again, was not golden at all, 
 but red, a dull, beautiful red, matching exactly, as Laura 
 was aware, with the beech leaves under which she sat as 
 she bickered with Justin and made it up again, one spring, 
 not sixty springs, ago. 
 
 "Laura you've shut your new skirt in the cupboard 
 door! You never look." 
 
 "Sorry, Auntie." 
 
 "Well, as I was saying I went down to the kitchen 
 directly after breakfast and I said " 
 
 Gran 'papa had been playing that day too. They could
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 275 
 
 see him at his window, sawing vigorously, from where 
 they sat . . . Justin had made one of his comical remarks 
 about it. ... It seemed such ages ago, now that spring. 
 ... It had been the last of the happy times. ... It was 
 soon after that, that things began to go wrong . . . badly 
 wrong. . . . Her thoughts roamed achingly over all the 
 trivial, tragical wrong that she and Justin had done each 
 other in the eternity that was not two years not two 
 years. . . . Gran 'papa had sixty years to retrace. Her 
 thoughts hovered over Gran 'papa awhile and then back 
 again to Justin. He was hard. . . . She didn't think she 
 could be so cruel to her worst enemy as Justin was to her. 
 . . . Not a word. . . . Not a message. . . . And not to 
 want a word! . . . Yet he was essentially a kindly man. 
 It was a queer lack of imagination, she supposed. . . . She 
 supposed he never thought of her at all. ... It was just 
 over for him. ... It never occurred to him that she 
 loved him still . . . that she lived in hell. . . . But it 
 wasn't that he wouldn't have cared if he could have under- 
 stood, she told herself in sudden passionate defence of 
 him. He couldn't help it it was the way he was 
 made. . . . 
 
 Well she had known all that. . . . That was why she 
 had done what she had done. She had staked all she 
 had . . . failed ... so she must pay. . . . Yet such a 
 price for birds' eggs! Birds' eggs! Her mouth twisted 
 sardonically. If it had happened to any one else how Jus- 
 tin would have laughed . . . how they would have talked 
 it over! She could hear him, laying down the law about 
 it. ... She missed that most of all that dear, absurd 
 solemnity of his as he laid down the law to her. . . . She 
 stood, remembering, hardening her eyes and her heart 
 against the tears she despised. How she missed him . . . 
 how unspeakably she missed him. . . . 
 
 What a fool she had been. . . . What was the use of 
 scruples. . . . Why hadn't she kept what she had? . . . 
 She might have been married to him at that moment. . . .
 
 276 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 Even if he didn't love her half a loaf was better than no 
 bread. . . . Who was she to have imagined herself his 
 keeper? . . . He knew his own mind. . . . He had asked 
 her to marry him. . . . 
 
 Ha, ha, the wooing o't. 
 
 squeaked the violin. 
 
 "Did you ever hear of such a thing? Well I said to 
 her, quite quietly, you know, but with dignity I said to 
 her : ' I think, Ellen, the time has come to make a change. ' 
 Simply that. It was quite enough. She apologized at 
 once. ' ' 
 
 Laura murmured congratulations. She wished Aunt 
 Adela would be merciful enough to stop talking, or at any 
 rate needing answers. ... It was so difficult to think of 
 the right answers with that insistent tune ringing in one's 
 ears. . . . 
 
 It wavered and sank to a sigh as she listened against her 
 will 
 
 Time and chance are but a tide; 
 
 Ha, ha, the wooing o't; 
 Slighted love is sair to bide 
 
 It slackened and jarred as Gran 'papa's hand she knew 
 that pathetic, involuntary relaxation of his stiif fingers 
 mumbled the strings. But the half learnt words ran on 
 in her head, perverted into absurd appositeness 
 
 She may gae to France for me! 
 
 But it was Justin who had gone to France. . . . They 
 were killing three hundred men a day in France in the 
 trenches . . . where Justin was. . . . 
 
 For long minutes her terrible phantasy made it all very 
 clear to her, while the tune jangled on again to its happy 
 ending 
 
 Now they're crouse and canty baith
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 277 
 
 She waited for the last line, impatiently, as for release, 
 as for the breaking of a spell; but there came no sound 
 only a sudden silence that was louder than any sound. She 
 roused at it, pitifully chiding herself for the selfishness of 
 her misery and, regardless of Aunt Adela, bundled the 
 rest of her clothes into the wardrobe and hurried out of 
 the room. 
 
 Poor old Gran 'papa ... to leave him so long alone. 
 ... A string or something must have snapped. . . . She 
 must run down and see, and get him a new one . . . the 
 dresser drawers were so heavy for him to pull out. . . . 
 
 She ran down the stairs in her swift, noiseless fashion 
 and tapped at his door, and tapped again, and then, with 
 a sudden catching of breath, opened it. 
 
 She had been right: something had snapped indeed. A 
 cord a silver cord had been loosed; but it was not the 
 G string of the little old fiddle.
 
 CHAPTER XXXII 
 
 THE funeral of old Mr. Valentine, the 'To Let' board on 
 Green Gates, and the cottage into which the Miss Valentines 
 were to move at the March quarter, gave Brackenhurst a 
 pleasant change from, the Mad Dog of Europe and the 
 soaring prices of meat and margarine. But long before the 
 subject was exhausted it had to make way in turn for the 
 news that Justin Cloud had been made a Captain "Oh, 
 three stars, I believe: it's the Majors that have the 
 crown " and that Robin Gedge had married Annabel 
 Moulde at a registry office. It was Brackenhurst 's first 
 war wedding, and it divided the village into two camps, 
 into those that were more thrilled than shocked and those 
 that were more shocked than thrilled. Annabel, of course, 
 suffered as a pioneer does; for when Rhoda Cloud, six 
 months later, married a man she had nursed a week and 
 known a month, it was acclaimed as a most romantic affair ; 
 but Brackenhurst, rallying round Mrs. Gedge, had few 
 good words for Annabel and none at all for Laura Valen- 
 tine. For it came out, as such things will, that Laura 
 Valentine had been in the secret had actually gone up to 
 town with Annabel and had seen her married. "Would 
 you believe it? Such a sensible girl, and her grandfather 
 not dead six weeks ! ' ' 
 
 "And it wasn't " Aunt Adela wailed, "as if you'd 
 ever been friends with Annabel ! ' ' 
 
 "I know," said Laura guiltily. 
 
 She was as puzzled at her own conduct as Brackenhurst, 
 or as Annabel Moulde herself. 
 
 For Annabel, that silken skirmisher, had found herself, 
 as she sheltered at Green Gates one afternoon, neither 
 feinting, thrusting, nor awaiting attack ; but, huddled over 
 a comforting hearth, with the rain curtaining the windows, 
 
 278
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 279 
 
 the flames dancing from her little bronze toes on the fender 
 to Laura's kniting needles and back again to her toes, was 
 inexplicably impelled to confidences. 
 
 "Robin going out simply miserable, both of us. Mrs. 
 Gedge an old beast loathes me always has 'Wait till 
 the war's over' always the same old story." 
 
 It came out in jerks to the accompaniment of the crack- 
 ling fire and the purring of the cat on Laura's knee. 
 
 "If I were only married to him it would make all the 
 difference I could stand it then." Then, in sudden, 
 sullen retreat: "Oh, of course, I don't expect you to 
 understand. You think it's husband-hunting like Mrs. 
 Gedge." 
 
 Again there was a silence, with the flames lighting up 
 Annabel's face and losing Laura's in the shadows of 
 Gran 'papa's chair. 
 
 "Not that I care what you think. But if Kobin's hurt 
 they '11 keep me out. I couldn 't even wear mourn- 
 ing." 
 
 Laura's exclamation could have meant anything but 
 Annabel reddened, stammering a little 
 
 "Well, but can't you understand? It's true. I'd 
 
 have no right I want my right. And and I've 
 
 never felt like that about any of my boys. I never did 
 
 about Robin himself till the war. But now Oh, 
 
 Laura, what am I to do ? " 
 
 "Do? What can any one do?" Laura's voice was as 
 expressionless as her face. 
 
 "No that's just it. And yet I tell you, Laura, 
 
 sometimes I'm ready to take Robin at his word and marry 
 him in spite of his mother. ' ' 
 
 ' ' He wants that ? ' ' Laura paused a moment in her work 
 and considered the pretty, blubbered face thoughtfully. 
 
 "Well what do you think?" Annabel's smile suited 
 her better than tears. 
 
 "I see. Well, why don't you, then?" Laura turned 
 her sock with a flick.
 
 280 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 Annabel stared at her. 
 
 "What d'you mean run away? Keally? Seri- 
 ously?" 
 
 "Why not?" 
 
 Annabel giggled nervously. 
 
 "Well I haven't any money to begin with. I've spent 
 my next quarter already." 
 
 "I'd lend you some. And Robin would meet you in 
 town." 
 
 ' ' But but how could I ? Mother would never get over 
 it. Mother's terrified of Mrs. Gedge. I couldn't " 
 
 "Oh, well then " 
 
 Laura dropped the subject indifferently. 
 
 They sat awhile in silence. 
 
 Annabel fidgeted. Her restless eyes wandered round the 
 room. 
 
 "I ought to be going. The rain's stopped," she volun- 
 teered at last. 
 
 "Oh must you?" Laura rose courteously. 
 
 "Laura " Annabel stooped to pick up the disgruntled 
 tabby stretching itself indignantly on the hearthrug 
 "Laura if I did Laura do you honestly think it would 
 be right?" 
 
 "Right?" The flames had found Laura's face at last, 
 lighting up, laying bare its weakness and its strength, soft 
 eyes and tender mouth and the new hard lines about eyes 
 and mouth alike. ' ' Right ? You 're a woman, aren 't you ? 
 You've a man fighting for you? You give what you can 
 and take what you can while you 've the chance ! Right ? ' ' 
 Her voice deepened. "It's your own two lives! Don't 
 you let them rob you even if they are your own people. 
 They talk about prudence and marry in haste and tell 
 you to wait and wait and wait! It would be devilish 
 the way they talk, if they understood. But of course 
 they can't. They're old. They've forgotten. They mean 
 well. But you you take your chance!" 
 
 "But but " began Annabel helplessly.
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 281 
 
 "And there's another thing. You talk about rights. 
 It's not only your right. The children our children 
 they have their right to be born. Well and if he is 
 killed and you are poor you '11 be able to feed a child, and 
 clothe it, and teach it to read, I suppose if you can't send 
 it to Eton. You give it life anyway, and love, and care. 
 That ought to be good enough. 'What porridge had John 
 Keats'?" 
 
 "But you talk," Annabel whimpered. "I only want 
 Robin." 
 
 Laura, pulled up short, stared at her a moment. Then 
 she laughed. 
 
 "I know. Of course. Of course I know. And 
 and " she flushed prettily. "All I meant I only mean, 
 my dear it's no business of mine but if you want back- 
 ing, I'll back you. There's a telephone in the next room. 
 He's at Maidstone, isn't he? It's a trunk call. Aunt 
 Adela won 't be in till supper. You go and talk things over 
 with Robin." 
 
 And the end of it was that Annabel and Laura went up 
 to town by an early train one fine morning, for a day's 
 shopping. And indeed they did buy various trifles, be- 
 sides a white coat and skirt, and a white beaver hat, and an 
 inconspicuous bunch of lilies of the valley with a sprig of 
 orange blossom tucked away in the middle but they were 
 a present from Laura. Laura came home alone with a note 
 for Mrs. Moulde and another for Mrs. Gedge in her pocket 
 (she thrust them through the letter-boxes and fled) and, 
 as I told you, was cold-shouldered by the vicarage long 
 after Robin and Annabel had been forgiven. 
 
 But though Mrs. Cloud included the vicarage set in her 
 visitors' list, the vicarage set could not claim the honour 
 of including Mrs. Cloud. At any rate, Mrs. Cloud gave 
 no sign of disapprobation: might have been thought, in- 
 deed, to be kinder of late to Laura. But Mrs. Cloud was 
 always kind. Certainly it did Laura no harm to be met
 
 282 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 at the Priory more often than usual by Brackenhurst : in- 
 deed, as she called in for the third day running on some 
 small errand a basket of early primroses, I believe, that a 
 school child had given her, but that were so obviously 
 grown for the great glass bowl in the yellow parlour that 
 she had to pass them on she thought, to herself, she would 
 not permit herself to think, that it was like old times. . . .
 
 CHAPTER XXXIII 
 
 LAURA handed her basket to the maid, but she had not long 
 to wait. Mrs. Cloud was at home, quite eagerly at home to 
 an opportune Laura. Laura wondered at the warmth of 
 her greeting, at the gaiety of her air. 
 
 It was the first fine day of the spring, and the sun was 
 doing his best for an earth still wind-swept and doubt- 
 fully green, yet the light and warmth and the radiance that 
 filled the room seemed to emanate, not from him, but from 
 Mrs. Cloud herself, sitting in a glory by her windowful of 
 half grown daffodils, her lap a tumble of telegram and en- 
 velope and Laura 's primroses, young lights in her eyes, and 
 a letter, a letter, in her hand. 
 
 Justin had got his leave, Laura! Justin had got his 
 leave at last! Justin was coming home had written 
 twice contradictorily and now a wire! He would be 
 home tomorrow night. And in the meantime his letter had 
 come, the letter he had written before he was quite sure. 
 
 If it had arrived earlier Laura might have heard less 
 about it; but the gate at the end of the drive had barely 
 closed on the postman before it had opened again to her, 
 and Mrs. Cloud, full of her good tidings, had yielded to old 
 custom and the comfort of a listener. So Laura, though 
 she was not allowed to read the letter herself such privi- 
 leges were hers not longer yet heard its every word read 
 aloud by a voice that, strengthened by excitement, was 
 more than ever the softened, haunting shadow of Justin's. 
 
 Such a delightful letter as it was too such a hasty, 
 pencilled letter that yet found time to be full of prob- 
 lematical orderly detail of his itinerary, to be margined 
 with instructions as to what his mother was and was not 
 to do in the matter of coming to town and meeting trains 
 
 283
 
 284 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 a letter that had been so obviously written, not by Captain 
 Cloud of the Kentshires, but by H. J. Cloud of the Lower 
 Fifth, arriving for his half-term holiday and leaving no 
 item of the program to chance. Justin could write a good 
 letter, couldn't he, Laura? 
 
 Laura, always quiet and now quieter than ever, with con- 
 trolled hands and two bright spots of colour in her tired 
 face, made the little necessary ejaculations, steering so deli- 
 cately between indifference and absorption, that Mrs. Cloud 
 enjoyed her reponses as she enjoyed music, as a soothing 
 accompaniment to her own thoughts. So impersonal, in- 
 deed, could Laura be, that it was not until she was left 
 alone again that Mrs. Cloud realized that she had broken 
 through her rule of avoiding the subject of Justin the 
 rule that she had devised, half to spare and half to punish 
 a criminal Laura. 
 
 She shrugged her shoulders. She could not be deeply 
 disturbed. Her anger, for she had had her guess-work 
 anger on behalf of an injured but uncommunicative son, 
 had long ago died down. It smouldered, of course, flicker- 
 ing up occasionally into perplexed resentment: would 
 never, I think though Justin and Laura should miracu- 
 lously adjust their differences be completely extinguished ; 
 for it was not in Mrs. Cloud's nature, so sweetly oblivious 
 of sins against herself, ever to forgive a harshness or forget 
 a kindness rendered to those she loved; but the hot ashes 
 of it were hidden deep in her heart she had found herself 
 able, in time, to be reconciled, to pretend justice to Laura. 
 She said to herself very often that she did not want to be 
 unkind. . . . Justin, she admitted, was not an ordinary 
 boy. . . . He had needed understanding and Laura was 
 very young. ... If only they had either of them seen fit 
 to confide the cause of their quarrel to her, she was sure 
 that she could have helped them over it. ... Justin was 
 so much her own son that his reserve could not hurt her, 
 but she thought Laura should have come to her. . . . She 
 thought Laura owed her that. . . .
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 285 
 
 Mrs. Cloud, you see, was hampered by being fond of 
 Laura. She missed her, for Laura did not come as often as 
 in the old days: and Laura, as more than Mrs. Cloud had 
 discovered, had her insidious, disconcerting way of becom- 
 ing indispensable. You tolerated the harmless creature, 
 acknowledging even a pleasant quality in it, as of unob- 
 trusive furniture, and then, one day, when you felt your- 
 self most free, it would turn on you, not a chair, not a 
 table, but a laughing woman, who challenged you, with a 
 twinkle, to try and do without her. 
 
 But Mrs. Cloud did not go into that. She only knew 
 that of all possible daughters-in-law she would have ob- 
 jected least to Laura Valentine. For she and Laura had 
 always shared, though they did not know it, their prophetic 
 dread of the Minx, rouged, gilded, and irresistible, who, if 
 they were not extremely careful, would one day carry 
 off Justin and make him miserable. Justin's deportment 
 at garden-parties, his invincible indifference to musical 
 comedies and mixed tennis, might reassure them momen- 
 tarily, but they never really believed that he could be 
 
 trusted by himself. And now he was in uniform For 
 
 they knew, the worldly twain, cynically they knew What 
 Women Were! There was that girl, for instance, that 
 much advertised friend of Rhoda's with the ear-rings 
 who had openly announced herself as dying to meet Cap- 
 tain Cloud. Hussy ! Impassive Laura, handing tea-cakes, 
 had been so grateful to Mrs. Cloud for sniffing. 
 
 But then, in spite of their differences, Mrs. Cloud and 
 Laura always did understand each other. 
 
 Laura said good-bye at last, and went away, leaving Mrs. 
 Cloud in a happy fever of activity, bewildering herself 
 with Bradshaw, interviewing the coachman, and in defiance 
 of her half a dozen servants, airing sheets at the drawing- 
 room fire. Master Justin Captain Cloud, I mean is 
 coming home ! 
 
 Justin Captain Cloud, I mean is coming home. 
 
 The theme was Mrs. Cloud's, rang in her head in Mrs.
 
 286 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 Cloud's voice, but the intricacies of its variations were 
 Laura's own. She was utterly unable to force her mind 
 from the subject. Her brain was a like a keyboard at 
 which her soul sat fingering out the Harmonious Justin, till 
 she was ready to scream. Her share of what the village 
 called war-work had not been light, and she was besides so 
 wearied out by the strain and the pain and the unlifting 
 terror of the past months, that her thoughts were often able 
 to escape her control, to weaken her still further by their 
 irresponsibility. There were times when she could not 
 think consecutively at all: and yet she could never stop 
 thinking, and at a furious rate, till her mind seemed a 
 cosmos bereft of gravity. 
 
 Into that chaos, which even Mrs. Cloud could never have 
 connected with Laura of the trim blue serges, and the 
 Refugee Committee, and the restful, smiling ways into 
 that chaos of dead hopes and living fears, Mrs. Cloud's 
 news flashed like a comet, brilliant, portentous. Justin was 
 coming home. 
 
 She tried to be blind to this new light in her sky. She 
 told herself that it had nothing to do with her, that she 
 must not, in pride, in decency, let her thoughts be con- 
 cerned with him. . . . But Justin was coming home! . . . 
 She had no right, she reminded herself fiercely, to be sorry 
 or glad any more for Justin. . . . But at least he would be 
 safe. . . . For a whole week he would be safe. . . . She 
 might sleep sound, if she could, for a whole week. . . . 
 She need not even pray. . . . All she might do all she 
 could do for a Justin safely home again, was to keep out 
 of his way. . . . He would not want to see her. . . . She 
 would not afford him, or herself, the embarrassment of a 
 meeting. . . . She would not spoil his holiday by appear- 
 ing to exist. . . . 
 
 She thought that she ought to go away altogether pay 
 some invented visit to imaginary relatives. . . . But that 
 she could not do. ... That probing her soul she could 
 not do. ... She found she had not, literally, the strength
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 287 
 
 to leave Brackenhurst when Justin was coming home. But 
 she would keep out of his way. . . . 
 
 Not that it would upset Justin if he did run into her. 
 . . . He would pass her she could see him as carelessly 
 as he might pass some futile cur that had once snapped at 
 him. . . . He would have put her out of his mind by now, 
 definitely and completely. . . . She knew his indifferent, 
 inexorable way . . . She had bruised herself often enough 
 against his unimagination, his sturdy mind that was like 
 a house with one window. Oh, he saw life clearly through 
 it but how little he saw! But there was no use in going 
 over that. . . . All she had to remember was to keep out 
 of his way. . . . But she would not leave Brackenhurst. 
 . . . For if Justin suppose that Justin suppose that by 
 some miracle Justin had changed had learned to forgive 
 to forget to want her again! Miracles did happen. . . . 
 
 You are right she cannot, at the time of his leave, have 
 been quite sane. For, all the long week, she lived, fiercely 
 as she denied it to herself, in mad, fantastic expectation of 
 that miracle. Every passer-by on the long road, every 
 click of the gate, every bell rung in the kitchen, every foot- 
 step on the gravel, from the paper-boy before the maids 
 came down to the gardener going home at night, was 
 Justin was Justin ! Fifty times in the weary day the 
 impossible happened, the miracle was vouchsafed, and 
 Justin came to her Justin, who never came. In the win- 
 dow-seat, above the white high-road, where, so many 
 years ago, she had watched for the coming of another love, 
 she crouched again and peered out at the passers-by, and 
 starved and starved for him. 
 
 Yet life ran on as usual in Brackenhurst, though Bel- 
 gium smoked to heaven and Justin were home on leave: 
 and Laura had her duties. Two days' grace, or three, 
 might be allowed her for her imaginary headache but on 
 the fourth Brackenhurst clamoured for its indispensable 
 Miss Valentine, and she must set out through by-ways 
 to her Belgians and her babies, to lunch at the other end
 
 288 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 of the village, with an afternoon's sewing to follow, and 
 must keep her eyes bright and her tongue wagging to amuse 
 her world the while. 
 
 The sun was near the edge of the earth before the Depot 
 gates closed on her and she was her own mistress again. 
 
 She hesitated. She was very tired, and Aunt Adela 
 would be fretful if she were late for tea. . . . She felt that 
 a scolding from Aunt Adela, the rasp of her plaintive voice, 
 must at all costs be avoided. . . . She felt that she might 
 turn Tartar if Aunt Adela scratched her just then which 
 wouldn't be fair to poor old Aunt Adela. . . . Besides, she 
 had no business to keep Aunt Adela waiting. . . . She 
 must take the short cut. . . . 
 
 She had hesitated because, though it saved her a mile, it 
 was a cut that ran across the Priory woods, driving a broad 
 grass-way through the heart of them, and rounding at one 
 point the Priory garden itself. And yet it was ridiculous 
 to be late for tea, to involve oneself with an irritable aunt, 
 just because her nearest way home skirted Justin's prop- 
 erty. . . . Would Justin be wandering in damp woods at 
 this time o' day at his tea-time o' day? . . . She knew 
 Justin. . . . Besides, what should he do in the woods ? He 
 didn't collect birds' eggs any more. . . . 
 
 She turned into the shining chestnut thickets, for she 
 knew the fox-ways of the undergrowth, and emerged again, 
 breathless, briar-whipped, into the green, central glade, 
 where the grass was twenty feet wide and the white violets 
 grew. This was her undoing. Laura could never resist 
 flowers. If Laura were being ferried over to hell she 
 would still have plunged to the elbow in the Styx, I think, 
 after its blotched lilies and these were violets, English 
 and very sweet. And they were the first of the year. Do 
 you think thre is any one too old and too sad to pick white 
 violets when they get the chance? 
 
 Laura was sad enough, but she was only twenty. For- 
 getting her hurry, she stooped down and began picking 
 violets.
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 289 
 
 There were so many of them that the ground was soon 
 covered with tiny short-stalked bunches, tied up with Aunt 
 Adela's khaki knitting wool. 
 
 The soft spring air was like new milk after the close, 
 people room she had left. The scent of the violets pleased 
 her. Each flower as she picked it sent its ghost, like a little 
 white thought, into her mind, to soothe and heal and 
 sweeten it. She was so blessedly absorbed, and the grass 
 was so thick and mossy, that she heard nothing, neither 
 footsteps nor creak of boots, till a voice, a familiar voice, 
 spoke above her. 
 
 "Why, Laura!" said the voice. 
 
 She was on her feet in an instant, but she was badly 
 startled. For, after all her reckonings, it was Justin 
 Justin, taking like herself his short cut through the woods 
 to his tea Justin, whom she had not seen for nearly a 
 year Justin, who was never going to speak to her again. 
 
 She gave him a wavering, frightened smile a smile that 
 deprecated its own existence, that assured him that it held 
 no graceless hint of welcome or intimacy, that it continued 
 merely as the only salutation that the lips on which it 
 trembled could at the moment attempt. And with that 
 faded again and left a white face whiter. 
 
 "Why, Laura!" repeated the miraculous Justin, in the 
 kind, solemn voice that had not altered for all her wicked- 
 ness, for all the war. 
 
 She found hurried words in which to answer, excusing 
 herself when there was no need. 
 
 "I was going home. And I was late. So I came this 
 way. I only stopped for a moment to pick the 
 violets ' ' 
 
 She stooped for her basket, huddling into it all the little 
 bunches that lay on the grass. She was thankful to have 
 a use for her betraying hands. 
 
 He was watching her, but she did not know what he 
 thought, for she was afraid to look up and see. She had 
 her basket filled too soon, and thereupon she stood like a
 
 290 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 schoolgirl, not knowing what to say or do. She moved a 
 step or two at last, to enable him to give her good-bye and 
 go his way. But his way was hers, it seemed: and he 
 walked beside her in silence down the green grass lane, be- 
 tween the whispering, watching trees. If he thought of 
 his tea he thought also, I suppose that Mrs. Cloud would 
 keep it hot for him. He was quite right : his mother would 
 have kept it hot for him till the crack of doom. But it is 
 just possible that he did not think about his tea. 
 
 Laura's eyes were decorously on the increasing circle of 
 sky at the end of the alley; yet with quick stolen glances 
 now and then she gleaned news of him. She thought he 
 looked tired, older a grey look. . . . She thought he did 
 not look well. . . . She disliked his yellowish clothes. 
 They did not suit him. . . . 
 
 Well at least she had seen him in his uniform. . . . 
 She had not realized before, slie thought contradictorily, 
 how jolly the ugly uniform could look. . . . She thought 
 how ordinary every other soldier she had seen would look 
 beside him. . . . She tried not to be ridicuously proud of 
 him, because she had no right, no right to that exquisite 
 pride. . . . She thought that she had not been mistaken 
 there was no one in the world like him. . . . 
 
 They came to a footpath through the hazel underwood 
 that ran at right angles to the broad grass-way. She was 
 sure he would make it his excuse for leaving her if he did 
 not want to talk. And how should he possibly want to 
 talk to her? . . . But Justin swung past the opening with 
 no more than a switch with his cane at the low-hanging 
 catkins that sent the pollen in clouds into the air. The 
 target of sky still seemed a long way off. Almost she 
 could have wished that he had left her, the silence op- 
 pressed her so. She supposed that she ought to talk to 
 him about the war. . . . Ridiculous phrases flitted through 
 her head 'How do you like the trenches?' 'Do the guns 
 make much noise?' but she could think of no sensible 
 opening.
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 291 
 
 At last to her intense relief, for speech was always as 
 much her protection as silence was his, he opened his 
 mouth. 
 
 "And how have you been rubbing along?" said Justin. 
 
 "Oh, all right," said Laura. Then brilliantly: "Have 
 you been all right ? ' ' 
 
 ' ' Oh, quite all right, ' ' said Justin. 
 
 There was an interval for meditation. 
 
 "Miss Adela pretty fit?" enquired Justin. 
 
 "Oh, splendid," said Laura. 
 
 "I should have called but it's such a short leave I 
 wish you'd explain " 
 
 "Oh, she quite understood," said Laura too readily, and 
 felt the conversation sag in her hands like a caught cricket 
 ball. She made an effort. 
 
 "Have a decent crossing?" she hazarded. 
 
 "Quite decent," said Justin. 
 
 "Oh good!" said Laura. 
 
 They paused again. 
 
 Laura thought she would leave things to him: she knew 
 by experience that if he did not want to talk nothing would 
 make him: she did not think he was embarrassed, for he 
 had always been too absorbed in himself to be self-con- 
 scious: therefore, if he talked, it would have some signifi- 
 cance. She waited, passively curious; for the shock of 
 meeting him had, for the time, numbed her. She was as 
 calm as is the heart of a whirlwind. 
 
 And soon, as she expected, he explained himself. 
 
 "Mother's been looking out for you," he told her 
 severely. "Why didn't you come? She says you always 
 come on Tuesdays." 
 
 'Why didn't you come?' She threw up her hands over 
 the denseness of his Justinity, as she lied to him. 
 
 "Oh I'm awfully sorry. I didn't know I mean I 
 forgot. I mean I've been so fearfully busy this week." 
 
 "What with?" he enquired. 
 
 "Oh, I don't know," said Laura.
 
 292 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 "Well, if you can, you might look in tomorrow," he de- 
 cided. "You see, I have to be out." 
 
 She glanced up at him : glanced down again. And then, 
 suddenly, all the dry deadness of her heart broke, like the 
 pope's staff, into bud, into little blossoms of laughter, deli- 
 cate bell-flowers that rang out in a thousand fairy caril- 
 lons of healing mirth. 
 
 Dear old Justin! . . . 'You see I have to be out.' So 
 exactly what Justin might have been reckoned upon to say. 
 . . . Her lips quivered: her shoulders shook: she was in 
 desperate danger of laughing aloud. She saw so clearly the 
 absurdity of their situation that it was all at once naked 
 of its embarrassment, of its sting. She wanted to share 
 the joke with him, but that was impossible. He would not 
 have been Justin if he could have seen the funny side of 
 himself. 
 
 'You see I have to be out.' . . . 
 
 'Yes, Justin dear Yes, Justin, dear I quite under- 
 stand!' she crooned to herself with wicked, bright-eyed 
 merriment. 
 
 "And the next day," continued his unconsciousness, "I 
 go back, you know. ' ' 
 
 The bells stopped ringing. 
 
 ' ' Oh ! ' ' said Laura sedately. 
 
 The circle of light had grown into an arch that was wide 
 as the sky. They crunched off the soft grass on to the chalk 
 of the road stretching north and south of them to Green 
 Gates and the Priory. 
 
 She found that they were to shake hands. 
 
 "Well so long!" said he. 
 
 "So long!" said she. 
 
 They went their ways. 
 
 And that was the end, for Laura, of Justin's first leave. 
 
 But she felt better. If it had done her good to see him, 
 it had done her all the good in the world, she thought, to 
 laugh at him. 
 
 What Justin thought, History does not say.
 
 CHAPTER XXXIV 
 
 THE spring and summer passed like one of those inter- 
 minable nightmares whose horror is in the fact that it is 
 ever about to be revealed, and never is revealed, to the 
 dreamer. Mrs. Cloud and Laura opened their papers at 
 breakfast, to read and shudder and murmur mechanically, 
 "Their poor wives God help them!" but the guilty sense 
 of reprieve would be gone before the meal was ended. 
 Fear was to be their portion rather than fact: and Mrs. 
 Cloud, for one, broke under the burden. She spoke little, 
 never of herself ; but she grew visibly older, turning under 
 Laura's anxious eyes into a silent old woman, content to 
 sit in the sun. But gradually Laura realized that she 
 was aware of her own failing strength, that she hus- 
 banded it of set purpose, that her very quietude was delib- 
 erate. When it was necessary she had words and counsel. 
 
 She never missed writing to her son quiet, cheerful 
 letters in a firm hand. And the answers she would read 
 aloud to Laura. 
 
 "A good boy, Laura to write so often. Three nights 
 without sleep again but he writes ! ' ' 
 
 Laura had her secret marvel at it, at these letters, so 
 like and so unlike Justin. Their frequency amazed her: 
 their familiar matter-of-factness made her smile; but there 
 were touches in them beyond her knowledge of him. He 
 did not take his discomforts seriously. There was actually 
 humour a trifle crude, more than a trifle grim but 
 humour. Once he made fun of himself. And he was anx- 
 ious about his mother eloquent in each letter on the ab- 
 surdity, nay, the sin, of worrying. And he wanted to 
 know how she slept. Once he said, 'Tell Laura to look 
 
 293
 
 294 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 after you!' He said that! He trusted her, you see, in 
 spite of everything. He trusted her. 
 
 She lived on that phrase for weeks. 
 
 And indeed she looked after Mrs. Cloud. She spent 
 more and more of her time at the Priory, bringing her war- 
 work with her, and gradually the control of the reduced 
 household slipped into her hands. Mrs. Cloud's small ail- 
 ments increased in frequency, and it was natural that the 
 driven doctor and the anxious maid should turn to Miss 
 Laura rather than to the invalid. And there was Timothy. 
 Timothy, rising five, with ideas of his own ( Coral cropping 
 up freakishly in the sound Cloud soil) Timothy, embar- 
 rassingly devoted, and a great deal too much for his grand- 
 mother, had become a problem: and until the ideal nurse 
 who did not quarrel with Mary and did not want special at- 
 tention had been discovered (but they were all at muni- 
 tions) he was inevitably Laura's business. She undertook, 
 at any rate, to tire him out for a couple of hours every 
 day, after which 'the temporary,' a hare-eyed child with 
 adenoids, was supposed to be able to cope with him. 
 
 Timothy enjoyed that summer. He was always more 
 than ready for his stern Miss Valentine to take him out 
 for a little exercise. Timothy's idea of exercise was a 
 variant of tip-and-run in the field behind the barns. Tim- 
 othy tipped and Laura ran. But when human nature 
 dropped at last, protesting, on a haycock, Timothy was 
 always kindly resigned to a rest. He would dig like a 
 terrier at the next cock, till he had shaped 'a arm-chair' 
 into which Laura would be inducted with much ceremony 
 and provided with a dock-leaf fan. These were courtesies 
 for which stories ("true stories, not silly old fairies," was 
 the typical Cloud proviso) were considered a graceful ac- 
 knowledgement. 
 
 Laura, beautifully trained before a week was out, would 
 accordingly parade for his criticism such desperadoes of 
 antiquity as Daniel, Jack the Giant Killer, Oliver Twist,
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 295 
 
 Jonah, and invariably conclude the entertainment, by re- 
 quest, with that favourite legend of her own childhood 
 'How Uncle Justin threw the porridge at Miss Beamish!' 
 
 "Well " and Timothy would squirm with excite- 
 ment, "once upon a time when Uncle Justin-at-the-war 
 
 was quite a little boy "and so on to the enthralling 
 
 catastrophe : 
 
 "And there was poor Miss Beamish with her hair all 
 messed " 
 
 "He was awful wasn't he?" 
 
 "Awful isn't the word!" 
 
 "Umn. Go on." 
 
 "Well that's about all." 
 
 "Is it?" 
 
 "Yes." 
 
 "Umn." Then, with the careful artlessness of child- 
 hood "Well shall we play a game now?" 
 
 "What shall we play?" 
 
 "Well you be Miss Beamish and I'll be Uncle Justin." 
 
 And when Laura had been realistically pelted with hay, 
 Timothy, still devising deviltry, would be suddenly fatigued 
 and would drop himself, like a toy he was tired of carry- 
 ing, solidly into Laura's lap, and fall asleep there and 
 then, his knobby little grass-stained knees pressed against 
 her, his hands, at the least movement, tightening on her 
 arm. 
 
 And while he slept and long after he was awake again 
 and had run into his dinner, she could feel those small 
 hands clutching, not her arm, but her very heart, and won- 
 der that in the touch there could be such pleasure and such 
 pain. 
 
 Children the very word was music. . . . What must it 
 be like to have children of one's own one's own? . . . 
 
 But that was one of the things, she supposed, that she 
 would have to do without jut have to do without unless 
 . . . unless, . . ,
 
 296 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 And then the wild thoughts that breed in a mind grown 
 conscious of its needs, its spiritual and bodily needs, would 
 rise in battle against her. 
 
 If Justin didn't want her? . . . She was young. ... It 
 was a big world . . . must she starve? . . . 
 
 And then she would shiver away again from such rescue, 
 perceiving that Justin, living or dead, was like a sword 
 between her and any other man; that isolation, right and 
 natural and torturing as her needs were for love and chil- 
 dren and the warmth of a common hearth, was the price 
 she must pay for all that he had taught her he, who 
 knew so little of what he taught. And perceived also that 
 if she were not to be happy as she reckoned happiness it 
 was not his fault, but the fault of her own nature. She 
 had railed so often at his un-imagination but how much 
 greater was her own, that could conceive no happiness 
 apart from him? Yet knowing at last her own nature, 
 could she wish it changed? If she were offered Lethe, 
 would she drink ? 
 
 She believed not. 
 
 And then she would be filled with a fierce disgust at her- 
 self that she could be thus occupied with her personal af- 
 fairs, with the infinitely unimportant pains and perplexi- 
 ties of her own toy tragedy, when, if she stood quiet and 
 the day were still, she could hear, so far away that it was 
 less sound than a tremor of the air, the mutter of the 
 Flanders guns.
 
 CHAPTER XXXV 
 
 JUSTIN'S next leave was nominally due in June. In Sep- 
 tember he began to be hopeful of getting it : his Christmas 
 epistles were models of linguistic control: and he arrived 
 soon after New Year to laugh at his sympathetically indig- 
 nant household for taking any notice of anything he might 
 have said in a letter: and, sobering, to be angry with his 
 mother for waiting at home for him instead of going to 
 Bournemouth like a sensible woman till the raids and the 
 fogs were over. He could have wired! She could have 
 got back in half a day : or he could have gone down to her, 
 even if it were jollier, in a way, to spend his leave at home. 
 Laura ought to have packed her off long ago, instead of 
 letting her sit day after day on that windy hill-top catch- 
 ing influenza! 
 
 But Mrs. Cloud, sitting up in bed and coughing between 
 her smiles, would not have Laura blamed. She did not 
 know what she and Timothy should have done without 
 Laura and would Laura run down once again, dear, to 
 see that Mary understands about an early lunch? "And 
 now, my son, let me look at you " 
 
 Laura slipped away. 
 
 It was a dreamlike week. It was so utterly incredible to 
 her that circumstances should have once more established 
 her at the Priory, that she could confront the situation 
 with comparative calmness, could even put aside her human 
 prerogative of saying suspiciously to happiness, "Yester- 
 day you were not! Tomorrow, where will you be?" and 
 bask as complacently as a cat or a flower in the spell of 
 sunshine. But she could not believe it to be real. 
 
 For she found herself sitting down to meals with Justin, 
 catching scraps of his talk with his mother, making no 
 
 297
 
 298 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 bones about sending him out of the room when she thought 
 Mrs. Cloud had had enough excitement, finding him ten 
 minutes later, when she had pulled the blind and settled 
 Mrs. Cloud for a nap and had come downstairs again, tap- 
 ping the barometer, raking the bookshelves or lounging by 
 the fire, abstractedly admiring the set of his puttees, bored 
 by the weather, very ready to talk to her. That, you see, 
 was what amazed her. She could understand his accept- 
 ance of her, with reserve, as a necessary evil while his 
 mother was ill ; but he was ready to talk to her ! He was 
 himself with her, unembarrassed, friendly, apparently un- 
 conscious that he had a right to be otherwise. It was un- 
 believably generous. It was in every way too good to be 
 true. She could not understand it in the least. It was 
 the most astonishing thing that had ever happened. It 
 took her just five minutes to become entirely accustomed to 
 it. 
 
 Yet she found that in his talk he was gradually and 
 unwittingly explaining himself to her. He was on a holi- 
 day : he wanted to be happy. He was unconsciously doing 
 what she was doing consciously. He was trying to put 
 aside all that could spoil his respite. 
 
 How great that respite was he told her, not knowing 
 that he told her, in a hundred tragi-comic ways. She was 
 ready to cry over his little comfortable movements in his 
 chair, his new, observant appreciation of the decencies of 
 life. His extraordinary interest in the concerns of the 
 Gedges and the Clouds and the Mouldes, expressed as it 
 was with all the old lordliness of manner, was so funny 
 that, but for the lump in her throat, she could have laughed 
 ohitright. Dear Justin he had always been thorough ! 
 . . . And then her attention would be caught afresh by 
 some unwonted gesture, some unfamiliar sentiment: and 
 she would tell herself anxiously that her disturbance was 
 out of all proportion to such causes. They were trifles, 
 merest trifles . . . but they pained and touched her. It 
 struck her that he was boisterous in his laughter over very
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 299 
 
 simple jokes. He moved more heavily, had acquired a 
 nervous trick of the hands. He was patently anxious to 
 put the war out of his mind, and it was obvious that he 
 could not do it. They would find themselves talking of the 
 war, he speaking as if compelled, yet with increasing un- 
 willingness, flagging into dull silence, and then, rousing 
 himself, beginning to talk of it again, formally, lifelessly, 
 incessantly. Bad for him she knew that it was bad for 
 him . . . She wondered if he thought her efforts to divert 
 him mere callousness? . . . Yet surely he must have his 
 holiday in peace? ... It was their business hers and his 
 mother's to see that he went back to his intolerable duty 
 with an aired and rested mind. But how? . . . "Was it, 
 she wondered, better for him first to disburden himself as 
 he wanted, yet did not want, to do? . . . 
 
 But at that she was, again, uneasily aware of change in 
 him, of a new reserve between them, a reserve born, not of 
 their personal estrangement, but of an experience unshared. 
 Where she had imagined, he had seen. It was not wonder- 
 ful if, subconsciously, he distrusted her capacity, the ca- 
 pacity of any safe and sheltered woman, to enter into his 
 memories, see with his eyes. But she, acknowledging, not 
 the justice, but the inevitability of his attitude, thought 
 only, 'What does that matter? The thing is to make him 
 rest. I'm a poor creature if I can't get him out of him- 
 self.' . . . 
 
 And on the third day she got her opportunity. 
 
 The second had passed in a whirl of excitement and laugh- 
 ter (only a little forced) and pleasure at his return, and 
 anxiety and fondness for his mother, in silent meals that 
 had given Laura her first inkling of the cloud upon him. 
 On the third day he had gone to town to do his necessary 
 shopping, and, in delighted extravagance, had brought back 
 half Covent Garden for Mrs. Cloud, and chocolates for no 
 one in particular, and complicated mechanical toys that 
 did not appease Timothy. For Timothy, playing second 
 fiddle for the first time since his grandmother had adopted
 
 300 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 him, had a grievance against his Uncle Justin. Timothy 
 gave Laura a bad moment as she put him to bed. 
 
 "Did you say thank-you to Uncle Justin when you said 
 good-night?" 
 
 "Don't like Uncle Justin." Timothy wriggled from 
 under the towel. 
 
 "Oh, Timothy, when he brought you that lovely motor- 
 car!" 
 
 "Don't like old motor-car. Want to see the birds in 
 Uncle Justin's room." 
 
 "What, my duck?" 
 
 "Birds sitting on eggs in Uncle Justin's room. Grannie 
 told me, only they're locked up till Uncle Justin comes 
 home. ' ' 
 
 "Grannie said that? Are you sure, Timmy?" 
 
 ' ' Yes, and said Uncle Justin would show me. And Uncle 
 Justin wouldn't. Said said Uncle Justin said " 
 
 "Said what, Timothy?" 
 
 Timothy scowled adorably. 
 
 "Don't like Uncle Justin. Where's my motor-car?" 
 
 "But Timothy " 
 
 "Want my motor-car." 
 
 And Laura, having been acquainted with that particular 
 tone in the Cloud voice for some thirteen years, gave him 
 his motor-car and said no more. 
 
 But she went down to dinner and Justin with bright 
 eyes and a flushed face, and had little to say as she sat 
 thinking across to him over the pot of daffodils. 
 
 'So so you never told your mother! But you tell her 
 everything! It was decent of you it was good of you 
 not to tell your mother. . . . ' And then, with such a pang 
 
 of pride in him, 'It was like you. Any one else It 
 
 was awfully good of you not to tell your mother.' . . . 
 
 And that evening, as they came down from Mrs. Cloud's 
 room (Mrs. Cloud hoped to get up the next day) she found 
 herself, because that tale of Timothy's had given her the
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 301 
 
 strangest courage, able to find the right words, the right 
 silences, able to unlock him at last. 
 
 And he spoke to the room, to the fire, to his own hands, 
 rather than to her of certain things daily seen and heard 
 and endured: spoke with a flatness of tone, a baldness of 
 phrase, that, to her at least, underlined his facts as no 
 eloquence could have done. He doled out horror like a 
 school-marm teaching dull children to read. 
 
 'The cat ate the rat.' 
 
 "Stuck him up against a wall and shot him." 
 
 "Wiped out forty " 
 
 "And after that there wasn't much Fritz left!" 
 
 And, urged on as it were, by her quivering receptiveness, 
 spoke finally of experiences, not (she thanked God) his 
 own, yet of his own first-hand knowledge: and found no 
 other way to tell her than with a hard stare, in direct and 
 brutal sentences, as if he thought 
 
 'Well, if it comes to that, why shouldn't you know? Do 
 you good you home people!' 
 
 She knew that his contempt was unconscious, impersonal ; 
 that she had no right to wince at it; nevertheless, it hurt. 
 She wanted to say, 'It's not fair. I do understand. As 
 if I wouldn't cut off my hands to be there instead of you! 
 It's you who'll never understand,' and shook off that ego- 
 tism to listen to him again, and had her reward when he 
 ended, quite naturally and simply, in turning from the 
 subject at last with that air of relief for which she had 
 worked and hoped, with a comfortable relaxation of his 
 whole body, and a smile that told her that he was feeling 
 better and was ready to be amused. 
 
 Ten minutes later, with the victorious inconsistency of 
 their race, they were shaking with laughter over the new 
 Bairnsfather drawings. 
 
 The next day already it was his last day but one was 
 a festival: Mrs. Cloud was to come down to tea and to 
 stay up to dinner.
 
 302 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 She had no business to do either, as she and Laura and 
 the doctor knew, but Mrs. Cloud was coming down ! 
 
 They bargained with the doctor. 
 
 If it were a fine warm day (But it was wet and 
 cold.) 
 
 If she kept quiet all the morning ("Then you must 
 look after Justin, Laura!") 
 
 If she promised to go to bed again really early 
 
 If if 
 
 In short Mrs. Cloud was coming down. 
 
 Hard upon Laura to be bothered with Justin, wasn't it? 
 When she was so particularly busy; when she had prom- 
 ised the Depot more work than she knew how to get 
 through. But she made no objection whatever: came 
 downstairs to him with obliging readiness: sat listening 
 with an air that might have been mistaken for satisfaction, 
 to the windy rain thudding at the windows. No going out 
 in such rain ! 
 
 She took up her half-finished sock and then had to put it 
 down again to help Justin. Justin was raking through the 
 bookshelves. 
 
 "Here what can I take back? Something solid. I'm 
 sick to death of sevenpennies. Mother is comical, you 
 know. She's got twice my brains but the books she 
 chooses!" He laughed: "I know she goes by the cover." 
 
 "You've read all these." Laura ran her hand along the 
 shelves. "No good giving you poetry, I suppose?" She 
 pulled out Men and Women. "Remember how Oliver was 
 always spouting the Italian things?" 
 
 He sighed. 
 
 ' ' He gave me that book too, poor devil ! ' ' 
 
 She looked at him, startled. 
 
 "Why what?" 
 
 "Didn't you see it? Artists' Rifles. Shot, his first 
 week out." 
 
 "Olfcarf" 
 
 He looked at her with a sad enough smile.
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 303 
 
 "Brings it home a bit, doesn't it?" 
 
 She shook her head incredulously. 
 
 "I never saw it. I never knew." And then: "His 
 poor wife " 
 
 Justin lit his pipe. 
 
 "I only met her once. She's married again, I believe." 
 
 There was a silence, with Laura whipping over page 
 after page of the volume in her hand. Suddenly she flamed 
 out 
 
 "Such women such women They make you 
 
 ashamed." Her eyes were pitiless. 
 
 Justin frowned thoughtfully. 
 
 "I don't know. I don't suppose he left her much to 
 live on. And she was an awfully pretty girl." 
 
 But at that, after one look flashed at him, she stared the 
 more resolutely at her book, lest he should see the amaze- 
 ment, the quick incredulous appreciation, in her eyes. 
 There had been no superiority in his voice nothing but 
 the real tolerance of comprehension! It was not he, but 
 she, Laura, who stood reproved for a lack of common 
 charity. . . . Poor young an awfully pretty girl! . . . 
 He was right. ... It was not for them to judge. . . . But 
 what had happened to Justin that he could see it and 
 say it? ... In a bewilderment so near happiness that it 
 frightened her, she began to talk at random. 
 
 "Yes yes I suppose so. "Well will you take it then? 
 There's heaps of reading in it." 
 
 He laughed. 
 
 "Too much for me. I started Bordello once. Pity he 
 would try to rhyme prose instead of singing songs." He 
 looked over her shoulder, his eyes caught by the italics that 
 laced the close print like birds' voices ringing through a 
 
 wood. "Ah that's better! Flower o' the rose 
 
 What is it?" 
 
 "Lippi. You know! Oliver was mad about it. Oliver 
 always said that Browning was a painter spoiled himself. ' ' 
 
 He nodded.
 
 304 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 "Shouldn't wonder. Oliver generally knew what he was 
 talking about. That now 
 
 Flower o' the peach, 
 Death for us all, and his own life for each! 
 
 Now that's good. That's likeable. That's poetry and 
 truth too. But the rest goes wrenching and jerking along 
 like like Vulcan. Club-foot divinity." 
 
 Again she was astonished. It was what she had always 
 thought but that he should think so too should put it 
 into words for her was epoch-making. She was over- 
 whelmed by the remorseful conviction that she had always 
 and systematically undervalued him. She was so much 
 occupied by that discovery that she did not notice, till he 
 called to her to "listen to this rot" that the book had slid 
 from her hand to his, that he was settling into his chair, 
 preparing to see-saw delightfully, abolishing Browning and 
 relenting to Browning, for the rest of the morning. 
 
 It was not quite what Laura wanted; but it was very 
 pleasant. 
 
 And she finished her sock.
 
 CHAPTER XXXVI 
 
 AND so, before he had more than arrived, as it seemed, 
 Justin's last day came. 
 
 He was to catch the four-twenty. Mrs. Cloud, refusing 
 to admit fatigue after her successful evening on the sofa, 
 was planning to be up again down, at least, for lunch 
 ready to see the poor boy off. But Justin decreed other- 
 wise. Justin, painfully made aware on this last visit how 
 weak the flesh had grown of that utterly willing spirit, was 
 firm with his mother. Get up to see him off? He would 
 like to see her try! There was Robert to see him off and 
 old Mary, wasn't there? And Laura? Pack? Now did 
 his mother think he should let her pack for him!? There 
 were boots, for instance, any one of which weighed more 
 than his mother. Perhaps his mother would like to clean 
 them for him first? No doubt! 
 
 He outlined his ideas. 
 
 They would spend a quiet morning together, and after 
 lunch she was to be good and settle down to her nap. Of 
 course he would run up before he left and say good-bye 
 again what did she think? But then she must promise 
 him to go to sleep, really to go to sleep no slippings out 
 of bed at the sound of carriage wheels no surreptitious 
 waving from behind window curtains. What? Did she 
 think he didn't know her little ways? 
 
 He sat with her, as he had promised, till she fell into a 
 light drowse, and then slipped away cautiously to his own 
 room. 
 
 Laura, sitting in the parlour below, her eyes on a book, 
 her ears a-prick at every sound, gave a sigh of relief as 
 she heard his tread and the thud of his baggage on the 
 floor. He had gone to his packing ... he would come 
 
 305
 
 306 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 soon now ... a matter of moments . . . for he always 
 packed as if he were cocking hay. . . . Ah she thought so 
 . . . his door was opening ... he was coming downstairs. 
 . . . She could afford at last to ignore the clock that stolid 
 thief who had impoverished her, filching one by one 
 twenty minutes of the hoarded sixty that were hers. 
 
 He paused in the hall long enough to give her a pang. 
 He was not going out? to the stables? Yet she was able 
 to look up indifferently when he opened at last the par- 
 lour door, and came in. 
 
 "Finished?" She smiled at him pleasantly with an air 
 of temporarily relinquishing her book, of being very ready 
 to return to it though, if he did not want to talk. She had 
 been well drilled. 
 
 However, he was communicative. 
 
 "There was hardly anything I'm not taking much. 
 Oh, by the way I've left some boots to be re-soled in 
 trees you might tell Mother. At least " 
 
 "Oh, 111 see to it," said Laura easily. "Heeled too?" 
 
 "I think so. Oh and there are some things in the 
 wardrobe want seeing to want cleaning." He elabo- 
 rated his directions. 
 
 A pause ensued, the inane pause that so often preludes a 
 leave-taking. He walked about the room. She read her 
 book. The clock ticked between them, saying 'your turn 
 your turn,' and each waited for the other to speak. 
 
 Justin bethought himself first. 
 
 "I say what about the trap? Has somebody told Rob- 
 ert?" 
 
 Laura nodded. 
 
 "I told him. Four o'clock. Time enough?" 
 
 "Heaps. You're fast." He tinkered with the hands: 
 and so having arrived at the hearth-rug and the second 
 armchair sat down. 
 
 She gave him a quick little glance of delight. He was 
 making himself comfortable! . . . He had crossed his 
 hands under his head: was leaning back: was looking at
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 307 
 
 her. . . . That meant that he was ready to talk. . . . She 
 leant back in her turn, her book closed over her hand. 
 
 "When's the next leave, Justin?" 
 
 "Lord knows!" he laughed. "You ought to have more 
 sense, Laura. That's the sort of insatiable thing Mother 
 says. ' ' 
 
 Laura laughed too, a touch of vexed colour in her cheeks. 
 She did not often trip. 
 
 But he continued, always unconscious 
 
 "Isn't Mother delicious about this war? this infamous 
 conspiracy of a Europe that ought to know better against 
 my peace and person? You know I never knew before 
 what claws Mother had. The bloodthirsty things she says ! 
 And means too bless her! Oh, it's all very well to laugh, 
 Laura! That's just what Mother complains of. People 
 don't realize how serious things are. A bullet might hit 
 me!" He chuckled over his joke. 
 
 Laura's laughter was an excellent imitation of the real 
 thing. 
 
 He grew sober again. 
 
 "I say I suppose influenza always does pull people 
 down so? She doesn't look at all fit." 
 
 "It's not the influenza. It's the war. It's the strain 
 the sitting still " she broke off. 
 
 "From her letters you'd say she was flourishing. I 
 
 didn't realize " He hesitated a moment. Then "I 
 
 say you might send me a line sometimes on your 
 own " 
 
 He did not see her nod. Expecting an answer, he 
 glanced up enquiringly to catch a look on her face that 
 set him thinking. When he spoke again his tone had al- 
 tered Mrs. Cloud had dropped out of sight. 
 
 "Will you? Don't forget. One likes getting letters out 
 there." 
 
 She flushed a sudden scarlet. 
 
 "I will. Of course I will. I would have before if I'd 
 thought if I'd dreamed you wanted if you'd said "
 
 308 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 She tangled herself into silence. But it was a silence that 
 was not pause but preparation, preliminary, the recession 
 of the sea between wave and wave. Here was her chance. 
 . . . For this she had prayed. . . . He was giving her her 
 chance! . . . She would take it. ... She would not be 
 cowardly, nor falsely ashamed. . . . She would take her 
 chance. . . . 
 
 "Justin I did write. I tried to write to you. I tore 
 it up. I thought you'd never listen. I wanted to explain 
 about that wicked thing I did. Justin I wanted to say 
 I want to say " She paused. Her face was burn- 
 ing. Her lips were dry. The shaping of words was diffi- 
 cult. She found herself looking to him for help. 
 
 He, too, had coloured; but his eyes were kind. He ut- 
 tered incredible words 
 
 "It's all right, Laura. Don't worry." 
 
 She could not comprehend. She stumbled on again. 
 
 " to say I'm sorry. You'll never know how sorry I 
 am. I'd no shadow of right to do it. I see that now." 
 
 She stopped abruptly, believing she saw in his quick 
 movement he had risen from his chair and was fidgeting 
 with the toys on the mantel his man's apprehension of a 
 scene. She watched him, absurdly occupied in piling 
 matches, spilliken fashion: watched and waited till she 
 could wait no longer. 
 
 "Justin " she petitioned. 
 
 He turned. He was smiling at her shyly, significantly, 
 half-laughing. 
 
 "Don't worry, Laura," he said again. 
 
 His meaning was obvious enough, yet she stared at him, 
 too incredulous to feel relief or contentment or triumph 
 any of the emotions she had a right to feel. 
 
 "Do you mean is it possible you don't mind any 
 more ? ' ' 
 
 "Not much," he confessed. 
 
 "You've got over it that I smashed it your eggs the 
 collection the only thing you ever cared about?"
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 309 
 
 ' ' Oh, look here I 'm not a fool, ' ' he protested. ' ' I never 
 made such a God Almighty out of them as that!" 
 
 "Oh, Justin, you did!" cried Laura. 
 
 It was tactless; but she was too relieved to be careful. 
 And yet a little blank a little sore. It was strange to feel 
 the nightmare of two years proved dream-stuff, swept aside, 
 nullified in a moment, with a laugh. ... It had been real 
 enough to her. . . . She had paid, she was still paying, it 
 seemed, for what he had long ago forgotten. . . . Somehow 
 it didn't seem fair. . . . 
 
 Justin's voice recalled her thoughts, shifted them from 
 herself to him. Her soreness passed as she listened to him, 
 grown serious again. He was explaining himself to her, 
 slowly, with naive interest. 
 
 "I suppose I did go off the tracks a bit. A thing takes 
 hold of you, somehow. Not the eggs the collecting. Any- 
 thing would have done as well as eggs. It just happened 
 to be eggs. Of course now I admit it was absurd. But 
 the whole business it made one's days so full. It was 
 ripping to feel so keen. And when you smashed them 
 there was a hole in the world. Nothing to fill it. I felt 
 lost soured I hated you. But when the war began all 
 that dwindled. The war but we talked about it the other 
 day. It's gone. Blown away. And now I don't care 
 any more. Not a ha '-penny cuss. Queer, isn't it? So 
 you needn't worry. I never think of it. But what I do 
 
 think sometimes what I've never understood " He 
 
 stopped in front of her, staring down at her with puzzled 
 eyes "Laura, what on earth made you do it?" 
 
 She flushed. 
 
 "It wasn't temper. It wasn't cattishness. " 
 
 "No. I knew that, you know, all the time really." 
 
 She hesitated painfully groping for the convincing 
 word. 
 
 "It was Because Oh, Justin, you know what 
 
 you said yourself, the other day about the war altering 
 people altering you, even. Oh, can't you see? I wanted
 
 810 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 to do for you what the war has done. I wasn't big 
 enough, I made an insane mess of it. But that's what I 
 tried to do." 
 
 She stopped, her eyes on her hands that trembled in her 
 lap. 
 
 "But why?" he said, "but why?" 
 
 She raised her eyes to his patiently, letting him see all he 
 chose, before she dropped them again. 
 
 The silence that lengthened between them was heavy, but 
 not hostile. It brooded, continued, till she imagined, she 
 dared to believe, that he was remembering, understanding, 
 filling in gaps. 
 
 He gave a great restless sigh at last, and moved away. 
 
 "We made a fine old muddle of it all," he said. 
 
 Laura had no words. 
 
 "Didn't we?" he appealed to her. 
 
 She gave him a rueful little smile. 
 
 "I suppose " His thoughts sent him with long 
 
 strides up and down and up and down the room brought 
 him to a standstill at last before Laura in her chair, 
 thought-bound too, yet more at peace than he. 
 
 "I suppose " he began again: and then, "Laura, 
 
 what do you think?" 
 
 She laughed at him then, openly a little fearless laugh 
 of pure amusement. Here was a novel gambit! "I 
 think," he would begin, deceptively deprecatory; but he 
 had never before said, "What do you think?" 
 
 He ignored her laughter, absently, as a nothing, a drift 
 of down, a puff of smoke from the wind-teased fire. He 
 was more deeply engaged. She had set him pondering 
 wondering and now, with an amazing, wise simplicity 
 that honoured him and her, he showed her where she had 
 led him, stated his difficulty. 
 
 "Do you think it's right to marry as people do abroad 
 arranged you know, without falling in love ? ' ' 
 
 She was slow in answering. She had her hope to strangle 
 her hope, the child of her love. She had to bury it deep,
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 311 
 
 to disown it utterly, as a crazed and shameful bastard. 
 But she did answer at last, faithfully, as she would have 
 had him answer her. 
 
 "It's the unforgivable sin," said Laura. 
 
 And he was not content. It was what he expected, what 
 he wanted. It confirmed him, justified him, was his own 
 definite belief. But it disappointed him. He had wanted 
 opposition, that he might overcome it. Her certainty dis- 
 concerted him, caused him to feel curiously aggrieved. 
 How could she be so sure? . . . One laid down hard and 
 fast rules; but there would always be exceptional cases. 
 . . . Was there, after all, no middle way? . . . 
 
 As if she had known his thoughts she began to speak her 
 own, freely and easily, as they came to her. For she had 
 gained something in the last minute, and she knew it. 
 Beggared she might be but she was free free at last to be 
 herself with Justin hoping nothing fearing nothing. 
 
 "After all," she meditated, "you say 'falling in love.' 
 But what do you mean? "Where will you draw the line? 
 What is love? Are there two people alive who mean pre- 
 cisely the same thing ? And yet it is the same thing. Just 
 as all the gods are God. Manifested," she smiled over 
 her long words "in endless diversity. Lancelot and 
 Guinevere Darby and Joan. But it's all love." 
 
 He half listened, her words interlacing his thought like 
 woof threading a web. What, after all, did he mean did 
 he want? . . . Yesterday's half forgotten verses flickered 
 upon his mind 
 
 Flower o' the 'broom? Maybe. . . . 
 
 Flower o y the pine? Not that, at least! . . . But what 
 did he want? . . . Romance, he supposed. . . . Yes, he 
 asked of Life romance. . . . And she tossed him Laura! 
 . . . With such an air, too, of knowing what was good for 
 him! . . . Other men adventured as they chose . . . over 
 hell under heaven . . . but Life had always grand- 
 mothered him, he thought, with a new resentful flash of 
 insight.
 
 312 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 Romance . . . the ideal woman . . . with mystery in her 
 eyes. . . . Yet would he after all find a position of perpet- 
 ual adoration comfortable? . . . Would Romance darn his 
 trousers when they rubbed through at the knees? . . . He 
 smiled. Laura would. . . . Yes one came back to Laura 
 . . . And if there were no mystery in Laura's eyes, whose 
 was the fault? . . . 
 
 Laura Laura a singing name. . . . He wished he 
 could make up his mind. . . . He wished she would say 
 something to him. . . . 
 
 But Laura sat silent. Knowing him as she knew her 
 Bible, she was generally aware of the trend of his thoughts, 
 for his simplicity was always naively defeating his reserve. 
 She felt, she knew, how easily because unconsciously, a 
 word from her, a glance, a gesture even, might weigh down, 
 at that moment, the balanced scales. And two years ago 
 she would have had no scruples: would have snatched at 
 happiness as a child snatches at a robin, curious, friendly, 
 hopping closer and closer. But now she could sit quiet, 
 light-breathing, letting it query and advance, and retreat 
 and advance again, letting it flit from knee to hand, from 
 hand to shoulder, to perch there singing its song to her, to 
 stay with her or fly away again at its own will. 
 
 No she would not appeal. . . . He must be free, as she 
 had learned to be free. ... In her garden she had flowers 
 for him thornless roses, fruits to satisfy a man's hunger 
 and thirst. . . . But he must pluck them for himself. . . . 
 She would proffer nothing. . . . 
 
 Yet she felt his intensity of unrest as if it were her own. 
 In that hour a sixth sense was love-lent to her, so that she 
 saw his mind, with its crowded, conflicting thoughts that 
 ran hither and thither like ants, with stumblings and be- 
 wilderments, with futile crossings and re-crossings, yet 
 always with a definite surge forward in one direction, in her 
 direction. His turmoil affected her strangely: she found 
 herself watching him placidly, with a sort of amused sym- 
 pathy. She knew how indignantly he disliked not being
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 31S 
 
 sure about everything in the world. Poor Justin ! It must 
 be maddening to him not to be sure about himself. . . . 
 
 All this on the surface of her mind: underneath, her 
 whole soul was crying out to him, "Justin! Justin!" call- 
 ing his name, passionately, with insistent iteration, as a 
 bird calls to its delaying mate. 
 
 And he, as if he heard, turned to her 
 
 "Laura " 
 
 "Yes, Justin?" 
 
 After all, he was very fond of her. . . . She belonged 
 in. ... The war had swept away so much . . . only the 
 bare verities survived duty sleep home and Laura. 
 . . . Surely he meant Laura too, when he thought, out 
 there, of coming home? Suppose he came home one day 
 and found her gone? . . . 
 
 His keen annoyance at the notion was queerly familiar. 
 He had utterly forgotten the incidents of their engagement- 
 day, and that she had ever told him that she might leave 
 Brackenhurst ; but he was certainly aware of an old annoy- 
 ance, and of something newer, stronger than annoyance a 
 chill, snaky pang that was very like fear. 
 
 Laura gone? 
 
 Flower o' the quince. . . . How the catches rang in his 
 head! 
 
 Flower o' the quince, 
 I let Lisa go, and what good in life since? 
 
 Oh, if it came to that! 
 
 He must have spoken aloud, for she lifted her eyes. 
 She was startled to see him coming to her across the room, 
 hard-pressed, in desperate fashion, like a man who would 
 shake off his own shadow. She half rose. She was sud- 
 denly frightened. She put out her hands, fending him 
 off. 
 
 "Justin Justin be sure " 
 
 She fell back in her chair because he was so near. 
 
 "Justin wait. Be sure. Be very, very sure." Her
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 lips trembled childishly. "You must be sure. If you 
 found out, afterwards I couldn't stand it twice." 
 
 It was so unlike her that he was shocked. He thought 
 she must have suffered beyond belief to say such a thing 
 to him. Sure? He would show her! . . . For an instant 
 he was a man enlightened forgetting all himself in an im- 
 pulse of pure tenderness. He would show her ! . . . 
 
 "Laura " 
 
 'One! two! three! four!' The clock chimed in sweet, 
 icy, maliciously sedate. 'And your train, Justin? And 
 your train?' Its echoes were lost in the crunch of the 
 punctual wheels on the drive. 
 
 His hands dropped again, between impatience and relief. 
 
 Laura rose hastily. It was pitiful to watch Martha oust- 
 ing Mary in her face. She was the old Laura, the wistful, 
 anxious Laura again, full of words and plannings and 
 solicitudes. 
 
 "You must go. I had forgotten. I had forgotten the 
 war. It isn 't the time. You mustn 't lose your train, Jus- 
 tin. Will you go quickly to your mother? Your bag 
 your mackintosh I '11 see to your things. I 'm coming with 
 you. I want to come with you. Your umbrella Of 
 course! Soldiers don't have umbrellas." 
 
 She followed him into the hall, and while he ran up- 
 stairs, went out on to the steps where old Robert and the 
 dog-cart awaited him. She spoke quickly. 
 
 "You can get down, Robert. I am driving Mr. Justin." 
 
 Robert, with a tall fighting son of his own, was tenacious 
 of his crack with the young master. He expostulated re- 
 spectfully. There had never been so fresh a mare as the 
 mare between the shafts of the dog-cart. 
 
 But Miss Laura courteous, thoughtful Miss Laura cut 
 inexorably through his suggestions. 
 
 "I'm driving Mr. Justin, Robert. He won't be a mo- 
 ment. ' ' 
 
 She took the reins from his unwilling hand and springing 
 up, settled herself quickly in his rightful place. He might
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 315 
 
 have been a chauffeur, a hired chauffeur, from her tone. 
 He retired to the back seat, outraged. 
 
 They said nothing at all during their short drive. 
 Laura's eyes, and for all Justin knew her thoughts, were 
 on the mare's ears, a-prick for an excuse to shy. And his 
 thoughts had travelled ahead of him. He was wondering 
 where he should find his men, and how. ... In a way he 
 shouldn't be sorry to get back. . . . One never knew what 
 might happen when one left the show to other people. . . . 
 Yet how he hated leaving it all ... his mother . . . and 
 the quiet . . . and his own den . . . and Laura. ... As 
 for Laura he was glad he was sorry that their talk had 
 broken where it had. . . . But Laura was right. ... It 
 wasn 't the time. . . . He had seen, as in- a crystal, a blurred 
 glimpse of what the future might hold for him Fair Haven 
 or Fata Morgana but which he could not tell ... he had 
 not time to tell. . . . 
 
 Fair Haven . . . his home his wife his children, his 
 own children a slip of a daughter, maybe a fierce, rain- 
 drenched imp with eyes like diamonds with eyes like 
 Laura's. . . . 
 
 Fair Haven? Fata Morgana? How was he to know? 
 Good Lord, how was he to know ? . . . 
 
 And then, resentfully "Why couldn't Laura no, 
 
 that wasn't fair she wasn't that sort but why couldn't 
 Life leave him alone ? He was doing his job he was fight- 
 ing. Why couldn't Life leave it at that? . . . Life, ob- 
 livious of wars and peaces, sitting like a spider in her great 
 web, spinning entanglements. . . . But he would not be 
 involved in her cobwebbery of commingling lives. . . . 
 Why shouldn't he be on his own? . . . 
 
 Flower o' the peach, 
 Death for us all, and his own life for each! 
 
 His own life for each! . . . There there was common 
 sense at last, behind the fever and the glamour! . . . His 
 own life for each. . . .
 
 316 FIRST THE BLADE 
 
 And yet one was lonely sometimes. . . . 
 
 Oh, well he must think things out. . . . But not now. 
 . . . Laura was right it wasn 't the time. He clung to the 
 comfortable phrase. That was the best of Laura. . . . She 
 was a reasonable woman . . . never worried you. ... It 
 was worth while to be at peace with Laura. . . . 
 
 How the week had flown! He wished he had had time 
 to go to London again. . . . There was that play he had 
 wanted to see. ... It must wait for his next leave. . . . 
 His next leave! He was as bad as Laura! And he had 
 forgotten to order but he had given Laura the list. . . . 
 Laura would see to all that. ... It would be a great relief 
 to be able to write to Laura again ... he hated worrying 
 his mother. . . . And Laura didn't mind the bother. . . . 
 It was comical he really believed she enjoyed it. ... 
 "Women were amazing creatures. . . . 
 
 They were none too soon at the station. Laura had 
 barely time to settle him in a carriage with his ticket and 
 his paper and his pipe, when a black and burly voice in- 
 terposed between her and the carriage door 
 
 "Stand back, please stand back now, please!" 
 
 The train began to move. 
 
 Justin thrust out a friendly hand. 
 
 ' ' Well good-bye, Laura. ' ' 
 
 "Good-bye, Justin." 
 
 She kept pace for a moment with the gathering speed of 
 the train. 
 
 "Justin take care! You will take care ? Don't bother 
 about V.C.s. and things." 
 
 He laughed at that. She could do so little for him, but 
 at least she could always make him laugh. 
 
 The train carried away Justin laughing. 
 
 She watched it dwindle to a toy and vanish in the tunnel, 
 and still stood watching till the track wavered and danced, 
 as she fought her blinding tears and petitioned the skies for 
 Justin.
 
 FIRST THE BLADE 317 
 
 "Keep him safe, God. God, keep him safe. Let him 
 come back to me. O God, let him come back to me." 
 
 One voice of a thousand thousand, uplifted daily, hourly, 
 in that cry how shall it be preferred? 
 
 Yet I believe, I cannot help believing, that in the fulness 
 of time he will come back to her. 
 
 Well, Collaborator do you like it? You are sitting so 
 silently in your big chair, and your knitting has dropped to 
 the floor 
 
 Collaborator, don't look so solemn! They're not real 
 people ! They 're not real troubles ! Only marionettes that 
 we have set a- jig- jigging up and down our mantelpiece to 
 make us laugh o' nights, and forget the unending war. 
 And now we will send them jigging up and down printed 
 pages, to do the same, if they can, for other poor folk. 
 
 Do you know how late it is, Collaborator ? Rake out the 
 fire, if you please, and come to bed. 
 
 What is the matter? You feel cheated? We have seen 
 the completion of Laura, you say but only the beginning 
 of Justin? But that is the story! It was to be a comedy 
 of growth not a drama of maturity. First the blade, then 
 the ear I never promised you the full corn. 
 
 Still you are not satisfied? You protest that you are a 
 practical person who calls a spade a spade, and you want 
 to know, and you want to know, and you want to know ? 
 
 Why, then you must go on with the book by yourself, 
 Collaborator, and in your own way. I'm at the end of my 
 inventions. I'm tired. I want to go to bed. I know no 
 more of Justin Cloud and Laura Valentine. 
 
 February 1916 October 1917. 
 
 FEINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
 
 ""THE following pages contain advertisements of books by 
 the same author or on kindred subjects.
 
 Regiment of Women 
 
 BY CLEMENCE DANE 
 
 Cloth, 12, $1.50 
 
 " A striking novel ... its descriptive and psychological brilliancy 
 equals that of the best work offered in modern fiction." American 
 Review of Reviews. 
 
 " Its types are so individually alive, its psychology is so well 
 dramatized and so little dissected, and its tragedy dissolves so 
 naturally into a glad denouement, that its ' too much ' is distinctly 
 that of a good thing." Life. 
 
 " ' Regiment of Women ' is a remarkable novel. It places the au- 
 thor immediately among the leading fiction writers of England." 
 New York Globe. 
 
 "'Regiment of Women' introduces a very remarkable character 
 . . . one of the most powerfully drawn figures in contemporary 
 literature. Miss Dane has made a vivid story, well calculated to 
 hold the reader's attention from the very beginning and to command 
 his praise at the end." Morning Telegraph. 
 
 " The author has been daring in confining her tale so long to 
 women, but she has succeeded. . . . She has a distinct sense of 
 style and much of the value of the novel, which is interesting be- 
 cause of its perverseness, is due to the entire adequacy of its dic- 
 tion." Boston Transcript. 
 
 "Written in an exceedingly graphic and vital way . . . done with 
 a fine restrained, always significant touch that reveals in the author 
 an artist of power, taste, knowledge and skill." New York Times. 
 
 THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
 
 Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York
 
 The Tree of Heaven 
 
 BY MAY SINCLAIR 
 
 Cloth, $1.60 
 
 " Thoughtful, dramatic, vivid, always well and at times beautifully 
 written, full of real people skilfully analyzed and presented, " The 
 Tree of Heaven " is one of the few great books which have as yet 
 come out of the war." New York Times. 
 
 " Miss Sinclair's genius consists in being able to combine great 
 art with a popular story-telling gift. All her detail, the many little 
 miracles of observation and understanding, are not dead nor cata- 
 logued, but are merged into the living body of her continuously in- 
 teresting narrative." New York Globe. 
 
 " Genius illumines every page of one of the most impressive works 
 of fiction of today. It is a novel of extraordinary power and worth 
 ranking assuredly among the novels of our time which will make a 
 lasting mark on literature and upon human thought and life." 
 New York Tribune. 
 
 " Miss Sinclair has written nothing that so perfectly represents 
 the chaotic spirit of England during the past twenty years. The 
 story contains much of matters that have nothing to do with the 
 war and in all of them she has portrayed the English character to 
 the life." Boston Transcript. 
 
 " The Book of the day is ' The Tree of Heaven.' It is a war 
 novel a gripping one. The story does not take us out of England 
 except in a few letters written from the battlefields towards the 
 close of the book, but it shows powerfully the effect of war on 
 England, as represented by a typical group of people, a most love- 
 able family, and their varied connections and friends." Philadel- 
 phia Telegraph. 
 
 " Stands out at once, and emphatically, from the common run of 
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 the description of the cities they visit and the people they 
 talk to. 
 
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